The Impact of William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth, the age's great Bard, had a significant impact on his contemporaries. Best known for his beautiful poems on nature, Wordsworth was a poet of reflection on things past. He realized however, that the memory of one's earlier emotional experiences is not an infinite source of poetic material. As Wordsworth grew older, there was an overall decline in his prowess as a poet. Life's inevitable change, with one's changes in monetary and social status, affected Wordsworth as well as his philosophies and political stances, sometimes to the chagrin of his contemporaries.
Wordsworth, once a poet of social radicalism, became conservative in his views later in life, which grieved many of his contemporaries. Such poets as Percy Shelley wrote critiques of Wordsworth and his change in allegiances, while others such as Felicia Hemans chose to write tributes of the man's past glory, and his impact on their lives.
In Percy Shelley's poem, "To Wordsworth", Shelley addresses Wordsworth's diminishing connection with his past. As age progresses, memories grow dim along with their ability to inspire new poetry. Shelley does not fault Wordsworth for that. Shelley writes, "Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know /That things depart which never may return
/These common woes I feel."(701 lines 1-5) Shelley is sympathetic to Wordsworth in regards to his declining ability to be inspired by past experience. It is a common experience shared by other poets, as Wordsworth asked himself in "Ode: Imitations of Immortality", "Whither is fled the visionary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?"(288 lines 56-57)Wordsworth feels something is missing, as Shelley notes, something has "fled like swee...
... middle of paper ...
...This is the point in their life Keats believes Reynolds and himself are finding themselves. Wordsworth has been through this point, and has explored the darker regions of the house. Wordsworth has made discoveries in these darkened rooms and has shed light on them. His discoveries however, are from "the general and gregarious advance of intellect," rather than "individual greatness of Mind."(893) Keats is saying Wordsworth has built upon Milton, and now they must build upon Wordsworth. There are still discoveries to be made, and Wordsworth should give them hope.
Wordsworth, a man of deep insight and incredible genius, impacts anyone who seriously reflects upon his work. It is no wonder that he should cause other great minds to pause and reflect. Whether to praise the man or critique him, one can not deny Wordsworth's life and work has had an impact on them.
The speaker of “Lines Composed of a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” is Wordsworth himself. He represents Romanticism’s spiritual view of nature. His poetry is written
Percy Bysshe Shelley died before seeing how influential and glorified his work would become. Shelley lived during the late 18th and early 19th century, during the industrial revolution. Seeing the evolving world, Shelley wrote for nothing more than to deliver urgent messages concerning humanity, humanity’s future, and who the powers at be should be. Shelley didn’t see the glory he deserved during his lifetime because his radical views of anti-tyranny were expressed in his poetry, driving them to underground distribution, but after his death he inspired countless other literary artists including including Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and Upton Sinclair and became regarded as a major romantic poet. Shelley exchanged his ideas with a group of visionary
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
William Wordsworth, like Blake, was linked with Romanticism. In fact, he was one of the very founders of Romanticism. He wrote poems are about nature, freedom and emotion. He was open about how he felt about life and what his life was like. Also, Wordsworth wrote poems about the events going on around him ? for instance the French Revolution. Mainly, Wordsworth wrote about nature, however, rarely used simple descriptions in his work. Instead, Wordsworth wrote complexly, for example in his poem ?Daffodils?.
Wordsworth visualized scenes while he was away, a way for him to feel a spiritual connection until he was able to return. Wordsworth states, “As a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But opt, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them” (Wordsworth 25-27). Wordsworth gives a sense of conformity and loneliness while being in the towns and cities. That he had his memories of when he was younger to keep him hopeful to return to nature and all the memories he had grasped the memories of. As the society today focuses merely on what they can profit from cities, Wordsworth understood the true meaning of memories. Memories today are mostly captured through social media, and in return being taken for granted. Wordsworth had nostalgic bliss as he replayed his memories, and knowing that in the future he could look back on that day and have the same feeling again. Social media today is destroying our memories and what we can relive in our minds as memories. We can know that when things are posted within social media it will get likes and be shared. However, there are not many people in society today that will remember the true essence of what nature has given to
Wordsworth's Poetry A lot of literature has been written about motherhood. Wordsworth is a well known English poet who mentions motherhood and female strength in several of his poems, including the Mad Mother, The Thorn, and The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman. This leads some critics to assume that these poems reflect Wordsworth's view of females. Wordsworth portrays women as dependent on motherhood for happiness, yet he also emphasizes female strength.
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 ...
William Wordsworth is a British poet who is associated with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Wordsworth’s mother died when he was seven years old, and he was an orphan at 13. This experience shapes much of his later work. Despite Wordsworth’s losses, he did well at Hawkshead Grammar School, where he firmly established his love of poetry. After Hawkshead, Wordsworth studied at St. John’s College in Cambridge and before his final semester, he set out on a walking tour of Europe, an experience that influenced both his poetry.
...dly had a profound effect on poetry during their celebrated writing careers. They took a new direction to poetry, which in short, brought it to the mainstream. In this regard, they opened the door to poetry for many people who had never been exposed to it. The Romantic ?Revolution? sparked numerous writings and forever changed the way poetry was written. In essence, what Wordsworth and Coleridge did was make poetry more about himself or herself rather than the epic style of Dante or Homer. They wrote about what they knew best, their own personal experiences.
He is writing the poem as if he were an object of the earth, and what it is like to once live and then die only to be reborn. On the other hand, Wordsworth takes images of meadows, fields, and birds and uses them to show what gives him life. Life being whatever a person needs to move on, and without those objects, they can't have life. Wordsworth does not compare himself to these things like Shelley, but instead uses them as an example of how he feels about the stages of living. Starting from an infant to a young boy into a man, a man who knows death is coming and can do nothing about it because it's part of life.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are two of the major figures of the Romantic period and their writings had a great impact on people and the anti-revolutionary spirit.
William Wordsworth has respect and has great admiration for nature. This is quite evident in all three of his poems; the Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey and Michael in that, his philosophy on the divinity, immortality and innocence of humans are elucidated in his connection with nature. For Wordsworth, himself, nature has a spirit, a soul of its own, and to know is to experience nature with all of your senses. In all three of his poems there are many references to seeing, hearing and feeling his surroundings. He speaks of hills, the woods, the rivers and streams, and the fields. Wordsworth comprehends, in each of us, that there is a natural resemblance to ourselves and the background of nature.
William Wordsworth was known as the poet of nature. He devoted his life to poetry and used his feeling for nature to express him self and how he evolved.
His poem recognizes the ordinary and turns it into a spectacular recollection, whose ordinary characteristics are his principal models for Nature. As Geoffrey H. Hartman notes in his “Wordsworth’s poetry 1787-1814”, “Anything in nature stirs [Wordsworth] and renews in turn his sense of 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.
It is obvious that through this perception Wordsworth is generally speaking of past experiences. Wordsworth believed that nature played a key role in spiritual understanding and stressed the role of memory in capturing the experiences of childhood.