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Theorical application of concept analysis
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The Sublime in "Tintern Abbey"
Lifting from Longinus, Burke, and Kant -- authors whose works Wordsworth would have read or known, perhaps indirectly, through Coleridge -- I want to look at how our reading of this nuanced term is necessarily problematic and difficult to pin down. Is the sublime a stylistic convention of visual representation? Is it a literary trope? Is it a verbal ruse? Or is the sublime a conceptual category defying, or at least interrogating the validity of verbal representation? Though I look at select passages from Tintern Abbey, reading (or re-reading) the concept into the poem, I take my guided (or misguided) understanding of the sublime as a springboard and template for reading subsequent treatments in other Romantics.*
Situated prior to and directly within this conceptual fabric is the contentious debate taking place between deism and pantheism. Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" seems to adopt or at least imply a pantheistic stance. What does the speaker mean in declaring "we see into the life of things" (50)? And what is he referring to when he notes that there is "a motion and a spirit that impels / All thinking things" (101-102)? I use this preliminary sample as a starting point to my cursory talk about the sublime. I don't attempt to decipher the full repercussions of the divine in Wordsworth, nor do I wish to provoke with the idea that the sublime is in no way rooted in religion; instead, I want to look at whether this idea can be subverted or at least destabilized and replaced with a more revolutionary turn, more inward and more existential, indeed one more suggestively rooted in subjectivity. In other words, the sublime -- as an aesthetic or philosophical concept -- plays a crucial role ...
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...the Sublime and Beautiful. The Sublime: a reader in British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. Ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Trans. J. H. Bernard. Hafner Press, 1951.
Longinus. On the Sublime. Classical Literary Criticism. Trans. T. S. Dorsch. Penguin Books, 1965.
Wordsworth, William. "Tintern Abbey." Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 240-244.
----"Prospectus to 'The Recluse'." Romanticism. 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 246-248.
---- "TheThirteen-Book Prelude." Romanticism. 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 284-474.
---- "The Sublime and the Beautiful." The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. Ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. 349-360.
4) Marshall, William. From A Review of the Landscape, a Didactic Poem, 1795. in The Sublime: A Reader in British 18th Century Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Ashfield, Andrew and de Bolla, Peter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
While Romantics did seek inspiration in solitude and the grandeur of nature, it is difficult to say whether there is only one Romantic notion of the sublime. It is doubtful that the sublime we encounter in Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is the same as the sublime of ‘Tintern Abbey’. Wordsworth tells us how “… in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din / Of towns and cities” he has received “tranquil restoration” from the memory of nature, and how this has sometimes led to the realization of a gift of “aspect more sublime”, which is a trance-like state, a “classical religious meditation” (Wlecke, 158) in which he can “see into the life of things” (lines 36-49). This seems to be a notion of the sublime that gradually reveals itself through the interaction between the human mind and the objects of its contemplation. Moreover, this philosophical gift is “abundant recompense” (line 89) for something that he has lost – the ability to be moved at a level below that of thought, by the sublime aspect of nature. At the time of his visit five years before, he had been “more like a man ...
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.
Wolfson, Susan and Peter Manning (eds.). The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. Volume 2A. New York: Longman, 1999.
Rebecca Wordsworth was, as many writers have pointed out, distressed at Wordsworth’s refusal to hold a full-time job—like many a youth after him, Wordsworth was living the carefree life of the artist. Rebecca wanted him put to rights. He should become an adult now. “Tintern Abbey” is Wordsworth’s attempt to explain himself to Rebecca, but also, in crucial ways, to himself.
Five different situations are suggested in "Lines" each divided into separate sections. The first section details the landscape around the abbey, as Wordsworth remembers it from five years ago. The second section describes the five-year lapse between visits to the abbey, during which he has thought often of his experience there. The third section specifies Wordsworth's attempt to use nature to see inside his inner self. The fourth section shows Wordsworth exerting his efforts from the preceding stanza to the landscape, discovering and remembering the refined state of mind the abbey provided him with. In the final section, Wordsworth searches for a means by which he can carry the experiences with him and maintain himself and his love for nature. .
What can be said about the sublime? Class discussion led to the definition of sublime as the element found in travel literature that is unexplainable. It is that part of travel literature where the writer is in awe of his or her surroundings, where nature can be dangerous or where nature reminds a human being of their mortality. The term "sublime" has been applied to travel texts studied in class and it is hard not to compare the sublime from texts earlier in the term to the texts in the later part of the term. Two texts that can be compared in terms of the sublime are A Tour in Switzerland by Helen Williams and History of a Six Weeks' Tour by Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley. There are similarities and differences found in both texts concerning individual perspectives of travel and the sublime. The main focus of this commentary will be comparing and contrasting the perspectives of Williams and Shelley within their respective texts, the language of the sublime and the descriptions of the sublime.
Burke, Edmund. On the Sublime and Beautiful. Vol. XXIV, Part 2. The Harvard Classics. New
Primarily in Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey the mortality of creativeness and imagination is expressed by Wordsworth. This is a poem about the beauty of an old cathedral called Tintern Abbey. He hasn’t been there in five years and he brought his sister along. Even though imagination isn’t immortal, there is a way to reclaim it, “That time is past, / and all its aching joys are ...
In conclusion, the sublime and the beautiful are major topics in romantic poems and novels. Different authors bring out the different ways they can be seen and interpreted. In the novel Frankenstein and the poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, the sublime and the beautiful are shown through the feelings and the mind of the main characters. In the poem “Mont Blanc,” the sublime is shown through the complexity of nature and how man will never truly be able to understand it. In order to have something beautiful there must be something sublime, and in order for they’re to be something sublime there must be something beautiful.
Goldblatt, and Brown. Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, Upper Saddle Ridge, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.
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.
Jones, John. The Egotistical Sublime, A History of Wordsworth’s Imagination. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960.
"The Poetry of William Wordsworth." SIRS Renaissance 20 May 2004: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 06 February 2010.