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The poems of william wordsworth A study
Romantic poetry and nature
The poems of william wordsworth A study
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'Frost at Midnight' is generally regarded as the greatest of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Conversation Poems' and is said to have influenced Wordsworth's pivotal work, 'Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey'. It is therefore apposite to analyse 'Frost at Midnight' with a view to revealing how the key concerns of Romanticism were communicated through the poem.
The Romantic period in English literature ran from around 1785, following the death of the eminent neo-classical writer Samuel Johnson, to the ascension of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837. However, in the years spanning this period writers were not identified as exponents of a recognised literary movement. It was only later that literary historians created and applied the term 'Romanticism'. Since then, a further distinction has been made between first and second generation Romantic writers. But even within these sub-divisions there exist points of divergence. As first generation Romantics, Coleridge and Wordsworth enjoyed an intimate friendship and collaborated to produce the seminal Romantic work, Lyrical Ballads (1798). But in his Biographia Literaria (1817) Coleridge cast a critical eye over the 'Preface to the Lyrical Ballads' (1800) and took issue with much of Wordsworth's poetical theory. Such discrepancies frustrate attempts to classify Romanticism as a monolithic movement and make establishing a workable set of key concerns problematic.
In his introduction to the Norton Anthology of English Literature M. H. Abrams attempts to overcome these difficulties by identifying the 'five cardinal elements' of Romantic poetry. According to Abrams, Romantic poetry is distinguished by the belief that poetry is not an "imitation of nature" but a "representation of the poet's internal emotions". Secondly, that the writing of poetry should be "an effortless expression" and not an "arduous exercise". The prevalence of nature in Romantic poetry and what Abrams calls "the glorification of the ordinary and the outcast" are identified as two further common elements, as is the sense of a "supernatural" or "satanic presence" (Abrams, 2000, pp. 7-11). It is with regard to this elemental understanding of Romantic poetry that I will conduct my close critical analysis of 'Frost at Midnight' to examine the extent to which the poem embodie...
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...the imagination, whereby ordinary things are presented to the mind in an unusual way" (Wolfson and Manning, 2003, p. 356). Finally, in the course of contrasting his own childhood with the upbringing he imagines for his child, the speaker makes a typically Romantic connection between the natural and the supernatural worlds. This is perhaps the key concern of the poem as it is explored and related to the Romantic belief that nature is the best teacher. On this point Abrams's elemental understanding of Romantic poetry seems insufficient. However, this is perhaps significant in highlighting the difficulties involved in defining Romanticism as a coherent literary movement.
Brian Hamill
Bibliography
Abrams, M. & Greenblatt, S. 2000. The Norton Anthology of English Literature 7th ed. Vol. 2. London: Norton.
Day, A. 1996. Romanticism. London: Routledge.
Dekker, G.1978. Coleridge and the Literature of Sensibility. London: Vision Press.
Mileur, J. 1982. Coleridge and the Art of Immanence. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Wolfson, S. & Manning, P. 2003. The Longman Anthology of English Literature Vol 2: The Romantics and their Contemporaries. London: Longman.
In the late eighteenth century arose in literature a period of social, political and religious confusion, the Romantic Movement, a movement that emphasized the emotional and the personal in reaction to classical values of order and objectivity. English poets like William Blake or Percy Bysshe Shelley seen themselves with the capacity of not only write about usual life, but also of man’s ultimate fate in an uncertain world. Furthermore, they all declared their belief in the natural goodness of man and his future. Mary Shelley is a good example, since she questioned the redemption through the union of the human consciousness with the supernatural. Even though this movement was well known, none of the British writers in fact acknowledged belonging to it; “.”1 But the main theme of assignment is the narrative voice in this Romantic works. The narrator is the person chosen by the author to tell the story to the readers. Traditionally, the person who narrated the tale was the author. But this was changing; the concept of unreliable narrator was starting to get used to provide the story with an atmosphere of suspense.
Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams. The Norton anthology of English literature. 9th ed., A, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. Pp
Bloom, Harold and Lionel Trilling, eds. Romantic Poetry and Prose. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Wordsworth and Coleridge seemed to be of a similar opinion to the general population throughout this whole period, they both began full of optimism for this time of change before slowly becoming more against it as shown in some of their poetry. ?Anecdote for Fathers? for example is a rather cynical poem focusing on a negative area of the human condition as a whole.
Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed. Vol. A. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print
Frost is far more than the simple agrarian writer some claim him to be. He is deceptively simple at first glance, writing poetry that is easy to understand on an immediate, superficial level. Closer examination of his texts, however, reveal his thoughts on deeply troubling psychological states of living in a modern world. As bombs exploded and bodies piled up in the World Wars, people were forced to consider not only death, but the aspects of human nature that could allow such atrocities to occur. By using natural themes and images to present modernist concerns, Frost creates poetry that both soothes his readers and asks them to consider the true nature of the world and themselves.
Abrams, M. H. et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 1. Sixth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, & Co. 1993. 200-254.
Stillinger, Jack, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Greenblatt, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. New York, N.Y: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print.
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Robert Frost is regarded as one of the most distinguished American poets in the twentieth century. His work usually realistically describes the rural life in New England in the early twentieth century and conveys complex social and philosophical themes. But his personal life was plagued with grief and loss, which is also reflected in his poems and the dark energy distinguishes Robert Frost’s poems, frequently conveyed in the use of lexical words like dark and its derivatives or synonyms, woods, snow, night, and so on. (Su, Y)
Wordsworth, William. Excerpt from The Thirteen-Book Prelude, Book VI. 1806. Romanticism: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 389-392.
... Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed. Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2012. 1166-86. Print.
Magnuson, Paul. "The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons & The Wordsworths in 1802." Criticism 4(2001):451. eLibrary. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.