Murder Ballads
Subtitle: Exhuming the Body Buried beneath Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
Publisher: punctum books
Published: 2016
Place of publication: Earth, Milky Way
Number of pages: 160
Subjects: Literary studies: poetry & poets
Description: In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were engaged in a top secret experiment. This was not, as many assume, the creation of a book of poetry. A book emerged, to be sure—the landmark Lyrical Ballads. But in Murder Ballads, David John Brennan posits that the two poets were in fact pursuing far different ends: to birth from their poems a singular, idealized Poet.  Despite their success, such Frankensteinian pursuits proved rife with consequence for the men. Doubts and questions plagued them: What does it mean to be a poet if your work is not your own? Who is best fit to lay claim to a parcel of poetic property that was collaboratively crafted and bequeathed to a fictitious Poet? How does one kill a Poet born of one’s own hand?  Blending critical examination with jocular playlets-in-verse featuring the authors of the two books in baffled conversation, Murder Ballads reopens a 200-year-old cold case that never received a proper investigation: Who was the first true Author of Lyrical Ballads, and how exactly did he die?
Notes: Open Access Unrestricted online access

Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

English