WILLIAM WORDSWORTH(1770-1850)

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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH(1770-1850)

• A Poets Quest for Nature or
• for His Self?

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Note Romanticism from Different Perspectives

• Deconstruction Feminism
• - what Romanticism really valorizes is not
  nature, but the human/male imagination, human
  language and male quest
• New Historicism-
• the ideological function of romantic imagination
  and pastoral was to disguise the exploitative
  nature of contemporary social relations
• Bate
• Wordsworth repositioned in a tradition of
  environmental consciousness, according to which
  human well-being is understood to be coordinate
  with the ecological health of the land. (p. 162)

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WHAT IS NATURE TO YOU?

• nature then/ To me was all in all.-

I have learned To look on nature, not as in the
hour Of thoughtless youth but hearing
oftentimes The still, sad
music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though
of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I
have felt A presence that disturbs me with the
joy Of elevated thoughts a sense sublime
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OUTLINE

• Introduction
• Wordsworth as a Poet and as a Person
• The Lyrical Ballads
• Tintern Abbey
• The Immortality Ode
• Short Poems

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WORDSWORTH THE POET -- 1797 - 1807

• 1791 2nd visit to France, disillusioned.
• 1797 He made friends with Coleridge lived near
  him in Sommerset
• 1798 Published Lyrical Ballads
• 1798-1799 German Period (Lucy Poems) ? Lake
  District
• 1805 completed The Prelude, without publishing
  it.
• 1807 published Poems in Two Volumes, also Lucy
  Poems.

• Wordsworth in 1798, about the time he began The
  Prelude.

Image source Wikipedia
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WORDSWORTH THE PERSON

• Portrait of William Wordsworth by Benjamin Robert
  Haydon

• 1795 Received a legacy sufficient to keep him
  independent, and settled down with his sister
  Dorothy
• 1798 tour to Tintern Abbey
• 1802 Received another sum of money, which
  allowed him to marry Mary Hutchinson Dorothy
  continued to live with the couple and grew close
  to Mary
• 1843 made poet Laureate
• 1850 died (80 years old) The Prelude
  published.

Image source Wikipedia
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LYRICAL BALLADS

• Significance

• Three Editions

• Style break with the conventional poetical
  tradition of the 18th century, i.e. with
  classicism in the language of the rustics
• Content about common life spontaneous overflow
  of powerful feeling, recollected in tranquility
  --memory (e.g. Daffodil poem, Tintern Abbey)
• Poet A Poet is a man speaking to men a man,
  it is true, endued with more lively sensibility,
  more enthusiasm and tenderness

• 1798 published anonymously
• 1800 Coleridge laboriously transcribed all of
  Ws poems, while Wordsworth refused to include
  "Christabel," , and insisted on adding to the
  preface an apology for the great defects of
  "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which he had
  always regarded with scorn. (Toynton)
• 1802

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WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

• Although it is probably an exaggeration to
  suggest, as the critic I. A. Richards does, that
  "Coleridge was Wordsworth's creator," Coleridge
  certainly gave him a metaphysical perspective, a
  largeness of understanding, that Wordsworth might
  never have found for himself. His previous work
  had drawn almost exclusively on instinctive
  sympathies now the writing of Tintern Abbey
  it took on the language of transcendence.
  (Toynton)
• Coleridge "No Hope of me! absol. Nuisance!
  God's mercy is it a dream!" "Wordsworth,
  Wordsworth has given me up. (Toynton)

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WHAT ENDED THEIR FRIENDSHIP COLLABORATION?
Next week Pandaemonium (2000)
Toynton
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TINTERN ABBEY

• Lines Composed a Few Miles
• above Tintern Abbey

-- A tourist poem about the picaturesque? -- A
nature poem? Or about memory? -- A political
poem or a religious poem with unmediated contact
with a pantheistic deity
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TINTERN ABBEY AND RIVER WYE
Source Wikipedia Left Tintern Abbey viewed
from the far (English) bank of the River
Wye Right The Chancel and Crossing of Tintern
Abbey, Looking towards the East Window by J. M.
W. Turner, 1794
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SAMUEL IRELAND, PICTURESQUE VIEW OF RIVER WYE
(1797)
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WILLIAM GILPIN OBSERVATIONS ON THE RIVER WYE.
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TINTERN ABBEY STRUCTURE
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TINTERN ABBEY STRUCTURE (2)
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Tinturn Abbey Discussion Questions

• Describes the interactions of the self and nature
  first, and with Dorothy
• stanza 1 Present Once again/Do I behold these
  steep and lofty cliffs. . . Self? cliff sky,
  cottage ? larger landscape
• Stanza 2 3 in a city
• Stanza 4 past and present
• Stanza 5 Dorothy
• 2. Wordsworths omission of the abbey?
• -- To avoid the picturesque or to avoid the
  implied social relations of the landscape

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Wordsworth the Picturesque

• Bate draws upon Wordsworth as an exemplar of
  ecocritical thinking, for Wordsworth did not view
  nature in Enlightenment terms - as that which
  must be tamed, ordered, and utilised - but as an
  area to be inhabited and reflected upon.
• e.g. ll 94-102. refuses to carve the world into
  object and subject the same force animates both
  consciousness and all things.

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Parody of the Picturesque

• Dr. Syntax In Search of the PICturesque (William
  Comb)

The aesthete bemuses the locals
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Wordsworth on the Picturesque

• He another poet used to go out with a pencil
  and a tablet, and note what struck him, thus an
  old tower, a dashing stream, a green slope,
  and make a picture out of it . . .But Nature
  does not allow an inventory to be made of her
  charms! He should have left his pencil behind,
  and gone forth in a meditative spirit and, on a
  later day, he should have embodied in verse not
  all that he had noted, but what he best
  remembered of the scene, . . . (qtd in Bate 148)

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SOCIAL REALITY

• Observations on the River Wye . . . Relative
  Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (Rev. William
  Gilpin) the ruined abbey, however picturesque,
  served as a habitat for beggars and the
  wretchedly poor also the Wye, in the tidal
  portion downstream from the abbey, had noisy and
  smoky iron-smelting furnaces along its banks,
  while in some places the water was oozy and
  discolored. (Norton Anthology The Romantic
  Period Topics) (See also this page)

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Examples II Nature Childhood Romanticized?

• Immortality Ode Structure
• Stanzas I-II past glory vs. his present sense of
  loss
• Stanzas III IV his confirmation of the present
  beings while missing the visionary gleam bespoken
  by a tree, a field and the pansy
• Stanzas V-VII the process of human (our) growth
  and learning of different arts, lies and
  imitation in the lap of Earth
• Stanza VIII XI reconfirmation of both past
  affections, recollections and truths and the
  present natural beings and child (child --we)

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WORDSWORTH

• Immortality Ode

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IMMORTALITY ODE

• Do you agree that the child is father of the man?
• How is nature presented in this poem?
• Who are the you addressed in the poem?
• How does Wordsworth resolve the issue of
  inevitable aging, forgetting and death?

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IMMORTALITY ODE STRUCTURE
Dialectic between Present beauty vs. past glories
1
2
4
5
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IMMORTALITY ODE STRUCTURE
Process of forgetting. Thou little child
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7
8
9
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IMMORTALITY ODE STRUCTURE
Conclusion
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11
Q
Q
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DISCUSSION FOCUS

• Stanzas 5-7 give examples of the process of
  forgetting
• Stanzas 10-11 what are Wordsworths solution to
  aging and the loss of childhood glories?

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WORDSWORTHS

• Shorter Poems

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WE ARE SEVEN A SLUMBER DID MY SPIRIT SEAL

• We Are Seven

• A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

1. How does the poem represent the child?
2. And the speaker?
3. Why does the speak keep asking the child
   questions?

1. What tone does the poems speaker take? What
   does the slumber imply?
2. What kind of thing is she?
3. What effect is achieved in its having just one
   sentence? Its predominantly iambic meter?

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I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

• See Dorothys journal here http//en.wikipedia.or
  g/wiki/I_Wandered_Lonely_as_a_Cloud
• How are the speaker and the daffodils set in
  contrast?
• Is the poem all set in past tense?

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I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

• I wandered lonely as a cloudThat floats on high
  o'er vales and hills,When all at once I saw a
  crowd,A host, of golden daffodilsBeside the
  lake, beneath the trees,Fluttering and dancing
  in the breeze.Continuous as the stars that
  shineAnd twinkle on the milky way,They
  stretched in never-ending lineAlong the margin
  of a bayTen thousand saw I at a glance,Tossing
  their heads in sprightly dance.

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I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD

• The waves beside them danced but theyOut-did
  the sparkling waves in gleeA poet could not but
  be gay,In such a jocund companyI gazed---and
  gazed---but little thoughtWhat wealth the show
  to me had broughtFor oft, when on my couch I
  lieIn vacant or in pensive mood,They flash upon
  that inward eyeWhich is the bliss of
  solitudeAnd then my heart with pleasure
  fills,And dances with the daffodils.

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WORKS CITED

• Toynton, Evelyn. "A delicious torment the
  friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge." Harper's
  Magazine June 2007 88. Literature Resource
  Center. Web. 22 Sep. 2012.
• Bate, Johnathan. The Song of the Earth.