Abbey"]. In this form the 'Lyrical Ballads' were
published."

Lyrical they hardly were, in any current meaning of that word; they were
narrative. But they were ballads as the word was then understood. The
two cardinal points of poetry that Coleridge says they had in view in
this partnership production were both believed to be special marks of
the ballad; the charm of homeliness and simplicity, and the spell of the
supernatural and romantic. Bishop Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry," 1765, had created a taste for the traditional poetry of humble
folk. Spreading to Germany and uniting there with the sentimental
sensationalism of the eighteenth century, this taste found expression in
Burger's "Lenore," which in turn had a powerful influence in England,
five distinct translations of it appearing in 1796. Of the distinction
so much insisted on by later analysts of the true popular ballad--its
communal origin, its impersonality, its freedom from adornment, its lack
of conscious art--the Englishman of Coleridge's time took no account.
"The Ancient Mariner" is not a ballad in the sense in which "Sir Patrick
Spens" or "Young Waters" is a ballad. It is in the highest degree a work
of conscious and individual art. It is rather to be classed, like
"Christabel," as a romance. But it was conceived and written under the
influence of the "ballad revival," and bears many marks of that
influence both in its general structure and in its details of
workmanship.

Much of the archaic diction and antique spelling, as well as the ruder
grotesquerie, that in the first edition proclaimed its relation to the
pseudo-balladry of the time disappeared in the later editions. But the
archaisms, the "unpoetical" diction, and especially the disregard of
tense coherence in the poem as we now have it, contribute greatly to the
atmosphere of romance--as of a story removed alike from the commonplace
experience of every day and from familiar literary conventions--which it
was Coleridge's intention to produce. By a few devotional
ejaculations--"Heaven's Mother send us grace!" "To Mary Queen the praise
be given!"--we are made to feel that the Ancient Mariner lived before
the Reformation, in the ages of wonder and faith. Repetition, as in many
stanzas of Part IV., is a device caught from the folk-ballad and
modified to produce the effect of a spell, which is so strong a mark of
the poem. The abrupt opening, the unannounced transitions in dialogue,
th