A reflection on Arnold's "Dover Beach" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"
Poetry that establishes its raison d'être as linguistic play is, for Wordsworth, "a matter of amusement and idle pleasure…as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing, or frontiniac or sherry" (Preface 250). Wordsworth condemns poets whose efforts contribute mainly in celebrating formal experimentation; he discriminates against poetry that has recourse to what he calls a "superlatively contemptible" (265) language. Wordsworth advises his readership to mistrust what he calls the "infinite caprices" (261) of poetic composition, and he claims that such artifice undermines what he holds as poetry's true task. He is skeptical of poets who "break in upon the sanctity of truth of [their] pictures by transitory and accidental ornaments, and endeavor to excite admiration of [themselves] by arts" (260).
Instead of celebrating metrical aesthetics as a pursuit valuable in its own right, Wordsworth regrets verse that compromises content for the whimsical satisfaction of effect and immediacy of impression. To safeguard poetry from such intransigence, then, Wordsworth proposes a poetry that is more transcendental or conceptual. He seems to conjoin poetry and philosophy with a greater end in view, no doubt one receptive of his own endeavor in mapping out a study of his introspective self:
Aristotle, I have been told, hath said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing. It is so. Its object is truth, not individual and local, but general and operative; not standing upon external testimony, which gives strength and divinity to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them from the same tribunal. (Preface 258)
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Arnold, Matthew. "Dover Beach." The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold. Ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry. Oxford University Press, 1950. 210-212.
Arnold, Matthew. "Wordsworth." Essays in Criticism: second series. Ed. S. R. Littlewood. London: Macmillan, 1951. 73-96.
McEathron, Scott. "Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads." A Companion to Romanticism. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 144-156.
Morgan, Thaïs. "Rereading Nature: Wordsworth between Swinburne and Arnold." Victorian Poetry 24:4 (1986 Winter): 427-439.
Trickett, Rachael. "Wordsworth and Arnold." The Wordsworth Circle 20:1 (1989 Winter): 50-56.
Wordsworth, William. "Tintern Abbey." Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 240-244.
Wordsworth, William. 1802 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 250-269.
... Works Cited Everett, Nicholas. From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamilton.
A metrical composition; a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme, and characterized by imagination and poetic diction; contradistinguished from prose; as, the poems of Homer or of Milton. This is but one of Webster 's definitions of a poem. Using this definition of “poem,” this paper will compare and contrast three different poems written by three different poets; William Shakespeare 's Sonnets 116, George Herbert’s Easter Wings and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Whoso List to Hunt.
G. Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. New York: Norton, 2000. Barth, Robert J. Romanticism and transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
Lyrical Ballads were written in a time of great change. They were dominated by the French Revolution and both Wordsworth and Coleridge felt great impact from this. There was disruption all over with the American War of Independence and other wars worldwide. Britain itself was changing rapidly due to colonial expansion, which brought new wealth, ideas and fashion, and there was much disturbance to both the people and the land with the act of enclosure, which may have meant more effective farming but less work. The introduction of the Poor Laws meant that landowners paid their remaining staff very little knowing that they would be supplemented by poor relief. However the conditions stated by the Laws before aid would be given were very similar to ?The Last Of The Flock? with people having to give up every means of self support and therefore reduce the chance of them ever living independently again. The Industrial Revolution introduced the new ?middle? class for which many of these poems were written for. They use simple language to allow them to understand and self educate, which many of them were very interested in doing and bettering themselves, much like Wordsworth himself and his sister as shown in ?Tintern Abbey?. Here he talks of her being at the stage of education that he was five years before when he last visited.
Kroeber, Karl. Romantic Landscape Vision: Constable and Wordsworth. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975.
During the 18th century, two great companion; William Wordsworth collaborated together to create Lyrical Ballad; one of the greatest works of the Romantic period. The two major poems of Lyrical Ballad are Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.” Even though these two poems contain different experiences of the two speakers, upon close reading of these poems, the similarities are found in their use of language, the tone, the use of illustrative imagery to fascinate the reader’s visual sense and the message to their loved ones.
Wordsworth, William. “The Thorn.” The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Vol. 2B. Ed. David Damrosch, et al. New York: Longman, 1999. 319-325.
Baum, Paull F. Ten Studies in the Poetry of Matthew Arnold. Durham: Duke UP, 1961.
Wordsworth, William. Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. M. H. Abrams Gen. ed. New York, London: Norton. 2 vols. 1993.
William Wordsworth is easily understood as a main author whom expresses the element of nature within his work. Wordsworth’s writings unravel the combination of the creation of beauty and sublime within the minds of man, as well as the receiver through naturalism. Wordsworth is known to be self-conscious of his immediate surroundings in the natural world, and to create his experience with it through imagination. It is common to point out Wordsworth speaking with, to, and for nature. Wordsworth had a strong sense of passion of finding ourselves as the individuals that we truly are through nature. Three poems which best agree with Wordsworth’s fascination with nature are: I Wandered as a Lonely Cloud, My Heart leaps up, and Composed upon Westminster Bridge. In I Wandered as a Lonely Cloud, Wordsworth claims that he would rather die than be without nature, because life isn’t life without it, and would be without the true happiness and pleasure nature brings to man. “So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me
Peters, John G. “Wordsworth’s TINTERN ABBEY” The Explicator(Washington) , Winter 2003, Vol. 61, Iss. 2, pg. 77 : eLibrary. Web 05 Mar 2002
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.
Durrant, Geoffrey. Wordsworth and the Great System, A Study of Wordsworth’s Poetic Universe. Cambridge: University Printing House, 1970.
"The Poetry of William Wordsworth." SIRS Renaissance 20 May 2004: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 06 February 2010.