Spontaneous over-flow of emotion…“Spots of time”His mind’s ability to transform remembered images of nature into a near “religious experience”Examples:Tintern AbbeyI wandered lonely as a cloud Often produces the great visionary moments of his poetry. ImaginationSeen as a powerful, active forceworks alongside our sensesinterprets the way we view the worldinfluences how we react to events. Nature – “Beauty of the Universe”Keenly interested in all the forms of natureOften finds it hard to describe simply Mainly explores the way which he responds and relates to the worldSaw a relationship between:Naturehuman lifeBelieves that nature can have an impact on:emotional lifespiritual life Language of “real men”What is the “proper” language of poetry?Wordsworth blurs the line between prose and poetryProblem: Why is the “language of rustics” the best?Examine the “conversational aspects”Ie: “We Are Seven”Speaks out against figurative language, but still uses it occasionally.2nd stanza of “She dwelt among the untrodden ways” Nowadays the words of popular songs are called lyrics.Ballad: A ballad is a poem or song which usually tells a story in the popular language of the day, and has associations with traditional folk culture.An experimentVaried in formBroke with the traditions of the neo-classical era that precededScenes of “common life” vs. Later the word was used for any short poem in which personal moods and emotions were expressed. Lyrical BalladsLyric: In ancient Greece, a lyric was a song to accompany music from a lyre (a stringed instrument). Preface to the Lyrical Ballads“Spirit of the age”Wants a literary revolution:Influenced by the French RevolutionIncorporate democratic principles into poetry“New Poetry” – themes:Scenes taken from common lifeLanguage of menSpontaneous over-flow of powerful feeling, recollected in tranquility.ImaginationBeauty of the universe Challenged accepted ideas:what poetry washow it might be written.Together with Coleridge, brought to poetry:fresh energynew direction He continued to live there for the rest of his life, with his wife, Mary, and his devoted sister, Dorothy.InfluenceCentral place in the Romantic periodExperimental poetInfluenced by the ideas of the timeliterature and art had a:new stress on individual creativityfreedom to innovate. His autobiographical poem The Prelude chronicles the spiritual growth and life of the poet, revealing the intense relationship Wordsworth had with nature as he was growing up in the Lake District. Wordsworth had been caught up in the French Revolution, had fathered an illegitimate daughter with a young Frenchwoman and returned to England with radical and democratic ideas (although his views became increasingly conservative in middle age). In celebrating nature and human emotions, he was an early leader of the English Romantic movement. He believed that poetry could use the real language of ordinary people in a state of ‘vivid sensation’. He published the influential Lyrical Ballads, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1798, rejecting the contrived, self-consciously poetic language that was fashionable at the time. Wordsworth’s early poems transformed the way in which poets came to express themselves. This is in opposition to the visionary, subjective and in many ways “Romantic” sensibility of the child. The narrator here has the air of an official census taker trying hard to establish objectively exactly where the child lives and how many siblings she has. In fact the first comprehensive census was carried out just a couple of years after this poem was published. What follows appears on one level to be a strange squabble between the adult narrator and the little “cottage-girl” concerning how many brothers and sisters she has but it is worth knowing that in the second part of the eighteenth century there had been much discussion as to the value of carrying out a population census. Notice how the poet describes the eight year old and the impact her appearance makes upon him: “Her beauty made me glad”. Written in ballad style the opening of the poem sees the narrator explaining to another adult how he came across a little girl whilst walking. The Romantics were fascinated by the idea of children embodying creativity and innocence and we certainly see in this encounter between the rational narrator and the imaginative child their markedly different views of the world and existence. This poem was included in the highly influential collection of poems, “The Lyrical Ballads” written by Wordsworth and Coleridge and published in 1798. ‘Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door, ‘Their graves are green, they may be seen,’
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