In 1798 a book of poems appeared that, more than any other, marks the beginning of the Romantic movement in Britain: Lyrical Ballads, with A Few Other Poems. The author is unnamed; in the second edition (1800), which has many more poems, and in the two later editions (1802 and 1805), the author is given as “W. Wordsworth,” but it is explained in the preface that some of the poems were written by a “friend,” who was soon known to be S. T. Coleridge. The first poem in it, soon the most famous of the lot, is Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere.” The great length of that poem (658 lines) is probably what justified the otherwise misleading title of the volume, for by one count there are twelve ballads and eleven “other poems,” though it is difficult to sort them out since some poems are in ballad form but with most unballad-like subjects and some are just the opposite. Five of the “other poems” are called “Lines” with various subtitles, and the last of these, the last poem in the book, is arguably the most important single poem of British Romanticism, both for its intrinsic greatness and for its impact on later poets: “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798.” It is by William Wordsworth.

The long and awkward title (though it is no longer than one of the other “Lines” titles) begged for a shorter version, and of course it has been known ever since simply as “Tintern Abbey.” That is unfortunate, for many casual readers of the poem are under the impression that the poem was written beside the great and beautiful ruin of the Cistercian abbey near Tintern, Wales, closed down by Henry VIII, or that the poem deals with it in some way. When I last visited the abbey, in the 1980s, Wordsworth’s poem was hanging in the museum, and when I asked the custodian where he thought Wordsworth composed his poem he pointed to a spot a hundred yards away on the banks of the Wye. From a few miles “above” (upstream), however, the ruin is not visible, and nothing is said about it in the poem. Whether or not Tintern Abbey is nonetheless somehow “in the poem” remains an interesting question, to which we shall return.