Lyrical Ballads

“Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me?”

Angela & Uncle Jerry identify the entire song as a neo-Romantic poem modelled on the principles laid out by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Lyrical Ballads, common language, common people, and an inward turning of the mind. Uncle Jerry argues Taylor adopts all three tenets: her use of common modern language ('sleaze,' 'cell phones'), her focus on ordinary experience, and her confessional inward turning. The Lyrical Ballads preface is treated as the manifesto Taylor is consciously echoing.