Southey's contribution to English poetry was to loosen it. His short ballads, mocked as they were in the Anti-Jacobin, possess freedom, vigour and humour. They are closely bound up with Lyrical Ballads, from which he borrowed before and after publication, but which he attacked in a highly influential review on its publication. Eight ballads are found in this successor volume to Poems 1797, which also includes the lengthy 'Vision of the Maid of Orleans', and a group of eclogues, among them the mournful 'Ruined cottage', plagiarized from Wordsworth.
