Summary: Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Lyrical Ballads, the collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge first published in 1798, which attempted to cast off the stultifying conventions of formal 18th-century poetry. Lyrical Ballads contains some of the best-known work by Coleridge and Wordsworth, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Tintern Abbey - and is today seen as a point of radical departure for poetry in English. Melvyn Bragg is joined by Judith Hawley, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London; Jonathan Bate, Provost of Worcester College, Oxford and Peter Swaab, Reader in English Literature at University College London.
