Wordsworth's Poetry

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Recommended: Romanticism in simple words

The Romantic thinking was influenced by the ideas upon poet and poetry sustained by three of the greatest writers of the age: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Byshe Shelley.

In the Preface of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads Wordworth sustained that the poet "is a man speaking to men- a man (it is true) endued with more sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has greater knowledge of human nature, and more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be the common among mankind"; a man who can delight other men in the spirit of life."

The poetry has a purpose: "Not that I mean to say that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formally conceived, but I also believe that my habits have so formed my feelings, as that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings will be found to carry along with them a purpose." (W. Wordsworth- Preface) The poetry is also "the image of man and nature." Wordsworth's attitude to nature is original and remarkable. Nature is the great teacher of morals, and the prime bringer of happiness, but it is much more than that: "in Nature resides God." In poems they -man and nature-become fused through participation in the "one mighty being, so that the most elemental natural ojects become humanised."

In the Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth defines poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." But the qualification that it originates from "emotion recollected in tranquility" shows that the process is not, in fact, spontaneous, as the composition only begins at some distance. In time from the incident or experience that is the subject-matter of the poem, in the case of poetry based on such subjects. ...

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...be the language of ordinary men and women, "found at its unspoilt in the speech of rural people": " The language of common men is adopted (purified indeed from what appear to its real defects- from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived, and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions."(W. Wordsworth- Preface).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

*Ioan Aurel Preda-English Romantic Poetics,pages 83-84, 161-164

*M. H. Abrams-Structure and Style in the greater Romantic Lyric, pages 201-203

*Anthony Burge-English Literature-A Convey for Students, Longman, Essex, 1991, page 168

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