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Theorical application of concept analysis
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The Sublime in "Tintern Abbey"
Lifting from Longinus, Burke, and Kant -- authors whose works Wordsworth would have read or known, perhaps indirectly, through Coleridge -- I want to look at how our reading of this nuanced term is necessarily problematic and difficult to pin down. Is the sublime a stylistic convention of visual representation? Is it a literary trope? Is it a verbal ruse? Or is the sublime a conceptual category defying, or at least interrogating the validity of verbal representation? Though I look at select passages from Tintern Abbey, reading (or re-reading) the concept into the poem, I take my guided (or misguided) understanding of the sublime as a springboard and template for reading subsequent treatments in other Romantics.*
Situated prior to and directly within this conceptual fabric is the contentious debate taking place between deism and pantheism. Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" seems to adopt or at least imply a pantheistic stance. What does the speaker mean in declaring "we see into the life of things" (50)? And what is he referring to when he notes that there is "a motion and a spirit that impels / All thinking things" (101-102)? I use this preliminary sample as a starting point to my cursory talk about the sublime. I don't attempt to decipher the full repercussions of the divine in Wordsworth, nor do I wish to provoke with the idea that the sublime is in no way rooted in religion; instead, I want to look at whether this idea can be subverted or at least destabilized and replaced with a more revolutionary turn, more inward and more existential, indeed one more suggestively rooted in subjectivity. In other words, the sublime -- as an aesthetic or philosophical concept -- plays a crucial role ...
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...the Sublime and Beautiful. The Sublime: a reader in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. Ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. J. H. Bernard. Hafner Press, 1951.
Longinus. On the Sublime. Classical Literary Criticism. Trans. T. S. Dorsch. Penguin Books, 1965.
Wordsworth, William. "Tintern Abbey." Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 240-244.
----"Prospectus to 'The Recluse'." Romanticism. 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 246-248.
---- "TheThirteen-Book Prelude." Romanticism. 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 284-474.
---- "The Sublime and the Beautiful." The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. 349-360.
While Romantics did seek inspiration in solitude and the grandeur of nature, it is difficult to say whether there is only one Romantic notion of the sublime. It is doubtful that the sublime we encounter in Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is the same as the sublime of ‘Tintern Abbey’. Wordsworth tells us how “… in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din / Of towns and cities” he has received “tranquil restoration” from the memory of nature, and how this has sometimes led to the realization of a gift of “aspect more sublime”, which is a trance-like state, a “classical religious meditation” (Wlecke, 158) in which he can “see into the life of things” (lines 36-49). This seems to be a notion of the sublime that gradually reveals itself through the interaction between the human mind and the objects of its contemplation. Moreover, this philosophical gift is “abundant recompense” (line 89) for something that he has lost – the ability to be moved at a level below that of thought, by the sublime aspect of nature. At the time of his visit five years before, he had been “more like a man ...
There are many persuasive writers who use ethos, pathos, and logos. Their techniques ensure that the audience leaves remembering the message. Patrick Henry brings out an emotional, religious, and contrasting message to his audience in his “Speech to the Virginia Convention”. Although there are many great rationalist, Patrick Henry is one of the most persuasive because he appeals to emotions, refers to religion, and compares and contrasts Britain to America.
What can be said about the sublime? Class discussion led to the definition of sublime as the element found in travel literature that is unexplainable. It is that part of travel literature where the writer is in awe of his or her surroundings, where nature can be dangerous or where nature reminds a human being of their mortality. The term "sublime" has been applied to travel texts studied in class and it is hard not to compare the sublime from texts earlier in the term to the texts in the later part of the term. Two texts that can be compared in terms of the sublime are A Tour in Switzerland by Helen Williams and History of a Six Weeks' Tour by Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. There are similarities and differences found in both texts concerning individual perspectives of travel and the sublime. The main focus of this commentary will be comparing and contrasting the perspectives of Williams and Shelley within their respective texts, the language of the sublime and the descriptions of the sublime.
(ll. 19-24) Wordsworth’s famous and simple poem, “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” expresses the Romantic Age’s appreciation for the beauty and truth that can be found in a setting as ordinary as a field of daffodils. With this final stanza, Wordsworth writes of the mind’s ability to carry those memories of nature’s beauty into any setting, whether city or country. His belief in the power of the imagination and the effect it can have on nature, and vice a versa, is evident in most of his work. This small
Wolfson, Susan and Peter Manning (eds.). The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. Volume 2A. New York: Longman, 1999.
4) Marshall, William. From A Review of the Landscape, a Didactic Poem, 1795. in The Sublime: A Reader in British 18th Century Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Ashfield, Andrew and de Bolla, Peter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
The Spleen by Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchelsea, presents an interesting poetic illustration of depression in the spleen. The spleen for Finch is an enigma, it is mysterious, shape-shifting, and melancholic. Melancholy leads the subject to flashes of a grander, terrifying emotion: the sublime. The subject of Finch’s Pindaric ode experiences the sublime, and yet has the uncanny ability to reflect and reason on the feeling with acuity--even though the subject suffers from depression, which in effect dulls sensory information. The fact that she intensely perceives the sublime suggests a paradox where dulled senses can produce a penetrative emotional episode. To understand the paradox, the theory of the sublime and Finch’s engagement with the sublime in The Spleen must be traced to conceive the state of the dulled mind in the thrall of an infinite, and transcendent wave of emotion. The focus of this essay is that Finch understands that Dullness, as a by-product of depression, enables rational thought during a sublime experience. Furthermore, she thus illustrates her experience through images where she emphasizes her sensory information and her feelings, which were supposedly numbed by depression. Her feelings, indicated in The Spleen, are the crux to how Finch is able to simultaneously feel numb, and process the sublime.
Rebecca Wordsworth was, as many writers have pointed out, distressed at Wordsworth’s refusal to hold a full-time job—like many a youth after him, Wordsworth was living the carefree life of the artist. Rebecca wanted him put to rights. He should become an adult now. “Tintern Abbey” is Wordsworth’s attempt to explain himself to Rebecca, but also, in crucial ways, to himself.
Five different situations are suggested in "Lines" each divided into separate sections. The first section details the landscape around the abbey, as Wordsworth remembers it from five years ago. The second section describes the five-year lapse between visits to the abbey, during which he has thought often of his experience there. The third section specifies Wordsworth's attempt to use nature to see inside his inner self. The fourth section shows Wordsworth exerting his efforts from the preceding stanza to the landscape, discovering and remembering the refined state of mind the abbey provided him with. In the final section, Wordsworth searches for a means by which he can carry the experiences with him and maintain himself and his love for nature. .
Primarily in Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey the mortality of creativeness and imagination is expressed by Wordsworth. This is a poem about the beauty of an old cathedral called Tintern Abbey. He hasn’t been there in five years and he brought his sister along. Even though imagination isn’t immortal, there is a way to reclaim it, “That time is past, / and all its aching joys are ...
Goldblatt, and Brown. Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, Upper Saddle Ridge, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.
His poem recognizes the ordinary and turns it into a spectacular recollection, whose ordinary characteristics are his principal models for Nature. As Geoffrey H. Hartman notes in his “Wordsworth’s poetry 1787-1814”, “Anything in nature stirs [Wordsworth] and renews in turn his sense of nature” (Hartman 29). “The Poetry of William Wordsworth” recalls a quote from the Prelude to Wordsworth’s 1802 edition of Lyrical ballads where they said “[he] believed his fellow poets should "choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them.in a selection of language really used by men” (Poetry). In the shallowest sense, Wordsworth is using his view of the Tintern Abbey as a platform or recollection, however, this ordinary act of recollection stirs within him a deeper understanding.
Hirsch, E. D. Jr. Wordsworth and Schelling a Typical Study of Romanticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.
William Wordsworth. “Lucy Gray.” English Romantic Poetry .Ed. Stanley Appelbaum. New York: Dover Publications, 1996. 33 – 4.
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them. For Wordsworth, the world itself, in all its glory, can be a place of suffering, which surely occurs within the world; Wordsworth is still comforted with the belief that all things happen by the hands of the divinity and the just and divine order of nature, itself.