In an instructional experiment in poetry in a college English literature course, chronology of publication and labels of authorship were ignored in the study of Wordsworth and Coleridge's "Lyrical Ballads." In the original plan for the "Lyrical Ballads," Coleridge was to supply poems treating supernatural elements as real, while Wordsworth was to give ordinary subjects the "charm of novelty" so as to invest them with supernatural feeling. In the instructional experiment, complementary poems were studied together, stripped of textbook apparatus, editorial explication, authors' biographies, and background events. A benefit of the approach was the students' realization that great poetry has been produced by writers working to submerge their own distinct identities to achieve an"associate labor." (DF)