Wordsworth’s Romantic Style Present in Tintern Abbey

William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” is an ideal example of romantic poetry. As the web page “Wordsworth Tintern Abbey” notes, this recollection was added to the end of his book Lyrical Ballads, as a spontaneous poem that formed upon revisiting Wye Valley with his sister (Wordsworth Tintern Abbey). His writing style incorporated all of the romantic perceptions, such as nature, the ordinary, the individual, the imagination, and distance, which he used to his most creative extent to create distinctive recollections of nature and emotion, centered on striking descriptions of his individual reactions to these every day, ordinary things.

Tintern Abbey is just an old ruin (William). However, throughout Wordsworth’s poetry Tintern Abbey becomes something slightly more than a ruin. His poem recognizes the ordinary and turns it into a spectacular recollection, whose ordinary characteristics are his principal models for Nature. As Geoffryy H. Hartman notes in his “Wordsworth’s poetry 1787-1814”, “Anything in nature stirs [Wordsworth] and renews in turn his sense for nature” (Hartman 29). “The Poetry of William Wordsworth” recalls a quote from the Prelude to Wordsworth’s 1802 edition of Lyrical ballads where they said “[he] believed his fellow poets should "choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them...in a selection of language really used by men” (Poetry). In the shallowest sense, Wordsworth is using his view of the Tintern Abbey as a platform or recollection, however, this ordinary act of recollection stirs within him a deeper understanding. In his elaboration in “Tintern Abbey”, he says “For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, s...

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... emotion, nature, and imagination which he used as effective tools in an exploration of humanity and memory, in hopes to reveal the true temperament of the human individual, or the search for the definitive nature, man, and so goes the quest of the romantics, and their focus on the individual; and thus “Nature will not stop writing” (Bloom 131).

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. William Wordsworth. New York: Chelsea House, 1985. Print.

Hartman, Geoffery H. Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814. New Haven: Yale UP, 1964. Print.

"The Poetry of William Wordsworth." SIRS Renaissance 20 May 2004: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 06 February 2010.

"Wordsworth ‘Tintern Abbey’" Wordsworth "Tintern Abbey" Web. 04 Feb. 2010. .

Wordsworth, William. Selected poetry. London: Penguin, 1992. 76-80. Print.