TEXT Reviews Lyrical Ballads, and other Poems, 1797-1800 . James Butler and Karen Green, eds. The text never seems determinate.
Print settles it.
An appendix includes physical descriptions of the manuscripts, critical prose relating to the poems, and transcriptions of the non-Wordsworthian poems contained in early editions of Lyrical Ballads. Considered in terms of these three aims, this particular volume of the Cornell Wordsworth succeeds very well. For Volume Two of Lyrical Ballads , the editors have taken the 1800 manuscript prepared by Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, Coleridge, and Sara Hutchinson for printing as the basis for the reading text. Readers will be grateful for the sheer abundance of information that the Cornell Lyrical Ballads provides. But once mastered, the system of notation is a powerful research tool that places a poem's textual and print history before critics and scholars.