Introducing a brief contemporary/spooky folk section.

Video- youtu.be/Q7h3TATTn0E

If Wordsworth had had the decency to die at a respectable Romantic age, ie under 30 and before his 1807 poems were published, he would have been the undisputed Hendrix of the group. He was as Radical as Blake (he travelled to France to join in the French Revolution and described it as "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ To be young was very heaven)" as passionate as Byron (he'd had a love affair and a daughter out of wedlock with a French girl while there) as visionary brilliant as Coleridge (they'd co-written the lyrical Ballads and its seismic Romantic manifesto together in 1798) as strange and gothic-beautiful as Keats (Wordsworth's definition of poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' is sometimes attributed to Keats) and as anti-establishment as Shelley (while Shelley was sent down from Oxford, Wordsworth simply walked out of Cambridge believing he could learn more from Nature and a walking tour of the continent.) The 1798 poems arranged here - part of 'The Lucy poems' and described as 'experimental' at the time - are perhaps the greatest achievement of this early 'disturbed' Wordsworth.

We reproduce below the original versions as taken from three of these Lucy poems. (Strange Fits of passion; She dwelt among th'untrodden ways - which was titled Song - and A slumber did my spirit seal"). They are a masterpiece of Romanticism: as sharp as a drystone wall; as fluent as a mountain stream; as clear as a March morning ; as wild as a upland wood.

His other definition of poetry "emotion recollected in tranquility" defined his later work but Wordsworth never really lost this visionary wildness. In old age he declared he loathed the Whigs but still "have much of the Chartist in me" and he must be the only Poet Laureate who secured an agreement not to actually write any laureate poems. But these dazzling early pieces can get lost behind the later establishment figure. We try to recreate their weird and experimental first appearance for a modern audience, performing over a nervous contemporary beat.

The simple folk ballad metre was a rootsy innovation at the time, reversing the classical formality and by then tired artificiality of the previous ('Augustan') age of reason and 'art' which Wordsworth and Coleridge helped to blast open with feeling, folk-magic and nature. The language is not 'Poetic' but that really used by ordinary people, the imagery sparse (when used at all) and when used natural and simple ('fair as a star when only one...') yet vivid and original ('a violet by a mossy stone'). But the most powerful thing about these love poems is the colossal emotion handed to single rhyme-emphasised words - 'trees', 'me', 'be' (such a tiny word conveying such enormity) at the end of lines and verses; not to mention that impossibly expressive 'oh'. There is nowhere in this naked language for a performer to hide.