The Romantic Imagination, Wordsworth, and "Tintern Abbey"
Historical Context
The Enlightenment, an intellectual movement of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, immediately preceded the time in which the Romantics were writing. In Britain, the work of Locke and Newton, who were proponents of empiricism and mechanism respectively, were central to Enlightenment philosophy.
Locke was the founder of empiricism, the belief that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience; Newton ushered in a mechanistic worldview when he formulated a mathematical description of the laws of mechanics and gravitation, which he applied to planetary and lunar motion.
In The Mirror and the Lamp M.H. Abrams notes that there was a "culmination of a tendency of the new philosophy in England, empirical in pretension and practical in orientation, to derogate poetry in comparison with science" (300).
Abrams also notes that "in his Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke (echoing the opinion of the Elizabethan Puritans that poets are wantons, as well as useless) does not disguise his contempt for the unprofitableness of a poetic career, either to the poet himself or (by implication) to others" (300).
Similarly, when Newton was asked for his judgement of poetry, he replied "I'll tell you that of Barrow:--he said, that poetry was a kind of ingenious nonsense" (Abrams 300).
Faced with this kind of attitude, poets such as Keats felt that "the matter of fact or science [was] not only the opposite, but [also] the enemy, of poetry in a war in which the victory, or even the survival, of poetry was far from certain" (303).
It is in this intellectual environment that the Romantic poets were formulating th...
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...al events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities," were shared, common experiences that bound people together as English subjects.
Bibliography
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1953.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991.
Bowra, C. M. The Romantic Imagination. London: Oxford UP, 1949.
Pyle, Forest. The Ideology of the Imagination. Standford: Standford UP, 1995.
Sherry, Charles. Wordsworth's Poetry of the Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980.
Wordsworth, William. "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads." Romanticism: An Anthology. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 357-366.
Wordsworth, William. "Tintern Abbey." Romanticism: An Anthology. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 265-269.
The Enlightenment was the time period that followed the Scientific Revolution and was characterized as the "Age of Reason". This was the time when man began to use his reason to discover the world around him rather than blindly follow what the previous authority, such as the Church and Classical Philosophers, stated to be true. The Enlightenment was a tremendously broad movement that dominated much of the European thinking during the 18th century, however, several core themes that epitomized the movement were the idea of progress, skepticism against the Church, and individualism.
A first influence was John Locke’s idea of Empiricism, which was the idea that all knowledge was gained by experiences, exclusively through the senses. A second vital influence was Transcendentalism, which was a reaction to Empiricism. While John Locke believed that reality or truth was constituted by the material world and by the senses, Transcendentalists believed that reality and truth exist within the spiritual or ideal world (Kerry Vermillion & Quinn McCumber).
...vocal statement about the ?organic? possibilities of poetry than optimistic readers might have expected. ?Mayflies? forces us to complicate Randall Jarrell?s neat formulation. Here Wilbur has not just seen and shown ?the bright underside of? a ?dark thing.? In a poem where the speaker stands in darkness looking at what ?animate[s] a ragged patch of glow? (l.4), we are left finally in a kind of grayness. We look from darkness into light and entertain an enchanting faith that we belong over there, in the immortal dance, but we aren?t there now. We are in the machine-shop of poetry. Its own fiat will not let us out completely.
Holbrook, David. Llareggub Revisted: Dylan Thomas and the State of Modern Poetry. Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1965. 100-101.
Edgar Allan Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the two giants of early American professional writing and poetry, while considered bitter rivals and often opposed in mindsets, still held some common beliefs about what poetry and creativity were. Despite Poe’s dark motifs and desire to unearth the deep and hidden emotions of man clashing with Emerson’s desire to speak for all and to make mankind see what it meant to be part of the Whole, the two men were still both poets, and this mix of difference yet similarity persists in their theories on writing and poetry. Their theories on poetry are both different and similar at once.
Both “Astronomer” and “Tables” take the same stance on science and nature; nature is a better teacher than science and both cannot coexist naturally. Although these poems have
Raffel, Burton. and Alexandra H. Olsen Poems and Prose from the Old English, (Yale University Press)Robert Bjork and John Niles,
poetry was in flux. It was constantly subject to change as poets developed their own
Toynton, Evelyn. "A DELICIOUS TORMENT: The friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge." Harper's. 01 Jun. 2007: 88. eLibrary. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.
"The most extraordinary career in modern poetry has unchallengingly been that of Ezra Pound. It was he more than anyone who made poets write modern verse, editors publish it, and readers read it" (374)
The Influence of Nature in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth
Of all the topics Wordsworth covered in his poetic lifetime, friendship stands out as a key occupation. His own personal friendship with Coleridge led to the co-writing of Lyrical Ballads in 1789. The poem “On Friendship,” written to Keats after an argument in 1854, states, “Would that we could make amends / And evermore be better friends.”
- - -. “Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800.” http://go.galegroup.com. N.p., 1988. Web. 9 Dec. 2010. .
The epoch known as the Age of Reason, or the Enlightenment, was a secular intellectual movement that looked to reason as an explanation of the world. The Enlightenment began in 1687 with the publishing of Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia and ended in 1789 with the French Revolution (Fiero 134). The epoch of Romanticism was a reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. The movement of Romanticism began in 1760 and ended in 1871. Romanticism as a movement was a reaction to the Enlightenment as a cultural movement, an aesthetic style, and an attitude of mind (210).
During the time-period when they authored this essay, the commonly held notion amongst people was that “In order to judge the poet’s performance, we must know what he intended.”, and this notion led to what is termed the ‘Intentional fallacy’. However, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that the intention, i.e., the design or plan in the author’s mind, of the author is neither available nor desirable for judging the success of a work of literary art. It is not available because the author will most certainly not be beside the reader when he/she reads the text, and not desirable because intention as mentioned already is nothing but the author’s attitude towards his work, the way he felt while writing the text and what made him write that particular piece of writing and these factors might distract the reader from deciphering the meaning from the text. This method of reading a text without any biographical or historical background of either the poem or the poet practiced by the New Critics was known as ‘Closed Reading’. This stemmed from their belief in the autonomy of the text.