William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. Ed. Michael Mason. Second edition, Harlow: Pearson Education, 2007. ISBN: 978-I-4058-4060-6. Price: £13.99 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800. Eds. Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter. Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2008. ISBN: 978-I-4058-4060-6. Price: US and C$ 19.95 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. An electronic scholarly edition. Eds. Bruce Graver and Ron Tetreault; technical editor, Vivien Hannon: http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/LB/

Whenever editors or publishers contemplate offering students and academics, as well as the general public, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads for the umpteenth time (and there seems to be no decline in the demand), they are faced with the unrelenting dilemma of what edition exactly to re-publish. As poetry readers and as scholars, our first instinct might be to start with the single volume of 1798, where we will get the creative enterprise in its simplest and most direct form (and if possible read it in one of the available facsimile publications); then read the second volume of the 1800 edition; and finally re-read the poems in the final two volume edition of 1805 – making notes as we go along on the changes spotted in the poems, and the way they are presented to the reader. If anybody were to follow this purely personal advice he or she would be in a good state to follow it in the three versions of Lyrical Ballads under review. Michael Mason does not seem to have had a great opinion of the first edition of the poem, and even says that “All in all, [the] 1798 [edition] deserves its celebrity only by a kind of courtesy” —a view with which one may wish to dissent vigorously (though naturally in a lyrical fashion), although Mason goes on to justify his dismissal by adding, reasonably, “One will not find anything significant in the first edition of LB which is not retained and perhaps improved in 1800 and later, augmented by Wordsworth’s remarkable prose and verse additions” (with which one would not want to disagree). He then proceeds to offer the reader the 1805 edition of Lyrical Ballads, leaving out everything that comes before apart from what he refers to in his commentary and footnotes, and is offered at the end of the volume. So perhaps Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter’s edition would be a better initial purchase, since there the inquisitive reader will find a reprint of the 1798 single volume as well as both volumes of the 1800 edition – so three volumes for the price of one. In their Introduction, Gamer and Porter describe having to choose “a base text … choosing not just one version of a poem over another, but also privileging one edition and one historical moment” as “an editorial no-win situation.” However, it also prompts them to provide what they claim is “A Dynamic Edition” that “will help readers to understand the textual revisions to individual poems, as well as providing insight into why Wordsworth radically reordered the contents of the first volume.” Nevertheless, anybody who wants even more dynamism, or perhaps has become addicted to volume change, may decide to stay glued to the computer screen, since in Bruce Graver and Ron Tetreault’s “electronic scholarly edition” the reader has access to all the editions of Lyrical Ballads from 1798 (both the Bristol and the London editions) to 1805, both as transcripts and as facsimiles. This enables the editors to offer what they call a “Dynamic collation” of all the texts of a single poem with the differing version of different editions on the screen at the same time, so that students can trace in detail the changes that were made over the years. Printing errors may also be examined in detail, as in the case of “Michael,” where in some copies of Volume II of the second edition of 1800 lines 202-16 were omitted. In this case, the text of the relevant pages of three copies of this edition may be compared: one with the error …