I loved listening to Melvyn Bragg's discussion on The Lyrical Ballads on Radio 4 this morning. It's been quite a while since I read them but you can read the whole collection online thanks to Project Gutenberg.

I've always quite liked Coleridge but I've never been much of a Wordsworth fan, yet this morning I loved reading through the poems. So far 'Goody Blake and Harry Gill' is my favourite, you can read about the background of the poem here.

When I was studying Utopian Political Thought at uni I wrote an essay on the utopian aspirations of the Romantic Poets (how to study poetry whilst doing a politics degree!). I loved studying the utopian stands in the Romantics, the effects of the ideals of the French Revolution and the later harsh reality of it on their poetry. The radio discussion covers some of this and Coleridge's vision of setting up a utopian community in America. Well worth a listen.