In Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” something that interested me was that he said that in his poetry he wanted to represent “incidents and situations from common life.” He said he wanted to use a “selection of language really used by men.” He does this throughout his poetry and it was interesting to me ...
The works of William Wordsworth are as ground-breaking and daring as they are numerous. Through his own unique perception of Nature, creation, and the relationship of the self to these ideas, Wordsworth carries the implications of Romantic Nature poetry above and beyond those of all other poets of his ilk; he goes so far as ...
In comparing Romantic writers such as William Blake, Robert Burns, and William Wordsworth, one realizes that, while Nature is a common element found in all three of these writers’ works, it is represented in quite different ways. This article will summarize how these writers choose to display to the reading audience grandeur of Nature and ...
The use of time and memory within poetry are two of the most constant themes in the works of the Romantic poets. Two of these poets, John Keats and William Wordsworth, employ these themes in some of their most prominent poetic works. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats describes pastoral imagery that is painted ...
For those in the 18th century who read poetry, there existed an idea called The Sublime, which had to deal with the feeling(s) a reader, or often someone in person, got when experiencing the natural world. There were two parts to this philosophy: the Dynamic, and the Mathematical. The Dynamic, for example, was “felt” upon ...
William Wordsworth valued poetry as a vehicle taken to a great many destinations, from personal creativity to political expression. The characteristic of his poetry that he most valued however, was his capacity to use this medium to communicate the importance of history in the modern day, as well as the impact it would have on ...
William Wordsworth is regarded as one of the founders of Romantic poetry, and was a major influence in the movement known as Romanticism. His poems were written for common people, about common people, and normally relating to nature. Two of his most famous poems, “Michael: A Pastoral Poem,” which was the final poem in the ...
Though William Wordsworth bristled at the thought of being lumped in with many of his contemporary Romantic poets, he, along with William Blake, did share the belief that the Imagination, or as Blake understood it as spiritual revelation, informed and gave breadth to poetry. Both poets saw a redemptive power in the Imagination and this ...
Although we don’t realize it when we read his works now, William Wordsworth was a revolutionary thinker in his time. He did not believe that the sublime was transcendent. Instead, his opinion was that the sublime could be found in the ordinary, or nature. Simple as this may sound, reaching the sublime did not merely ...
William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” brings to life many vibrant images of what the author saw on the occasion from which the poem is written. How he was wandering about is the first; floating lonely as a cloud, which could mean graceful, it could be fast or slow, but “o’er vales and ...