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william wordsworth poetry
romantic poets privileging emotions over reason
william wordsworth life and works
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The ecstatic love poets, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and John Keats were great poets of their time period. Their works influenced many people and it was influenced by the enlightenment, which changed the aspects of poetry and how it was written. All three poets shared the love of nature and wrote about the importance of not forgetting nature and how nature affects the earth. Nature as a teacher, spiritual elements, and personal freedom are elements of romantic poetry. The first of the three poets I will talk about is William Blake. William Blake was born in 1757 in London. William Blake was three out of six children in his family and was part of the lower-middle-class. At the age of 10 he started to attend drawing school and at
His father was a lawyer and his mom died when he was eight years old. William Wordsworth was sent to grammar school and learned Greek and Latin and studied the works of Shakespeare and Milton. In the summer of 1790 William Wordsworth traveled with a friend to France and the Alps. During this time period the French revolution took place. In 1798, they published a collection of poems called Lyrical Ballads, this was one of his best works, and completed the revolution of poetry. The World Is Too Much with Us is a poem that depicts how humans are wasting time on materialism and forgetting about nature. In the first line, the poet states, “The world is too much with us” (Wordsworth 596). This line is saying that we are becoming over populated by humans and that we are losing our connection with nature, “late and soon” (Wordsworth 596). William Wordsworth is talking about the past and future when he is saying late and soon. Wordsworth is telling us that we are getting too tied up with materialistic things, that is what Wordsworth is saying when he says, “Getting and spending” ( Wordsworth 596). “We lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours.” (Wordsworth 596). This is saying that we are wasting our power which means that we the human forget to use our mind and soul and not using our power. Nature is ours, but yet we just kill it and Wordsworth wants us to reconnect with nature and not take it
He was diagnosed with a mortal illness. John Keats was born in the year 1795 and was the oldest son of an ostler, a laborer who looked after horses. Keats was an apprentice to a surgeon and pursued a career in the medical field, but Keats found it horrifying and started writing poetry. 1818 Keats’ little brother died from tuberculosis. After his brother’s death, Keats started writing some of his most famous works, like “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Lamia,” the completion of his long poem Hyperion, all of his great odes. In John Keats’ works he shows the reader his luxurious language and sumptuous imagery. His stanzas in the poems shows beauty, his poems usually reflect on death, love, pain, art and nature just like the other two poets Wordsworth and Blake. John Keats uses his poems to symbolize things. In Ode to a Nightingale the poem symbolizes old age and how it is tragic. In the third stanza it says, “Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” (Keats 613). What I am getting from these two lines is in the first line is that we all get old and it is inevitable and there is no escaping it. The next line shows that we start off with our youth, but later on we get older and sad because we will miss that youth and than their life grows then and dies. In the first stanza just by reading the first
John Keats’s illness caused him to write about his unfulfillment as a writer. In an analysis of Keats’s works, Cody Brotter states that Keats’s poems are “conscious of itself as the poem[s] of a poet.” The poems are written in the context of Keats tragically short and painful life. In his ...
William Blake was a famous English poet, who lived during the Romantic Age. Blake was unrecognized and unappreciated during his life, however, now he is considered one of the greatest poets of his age. William Blake was born on November 28, 1757. Growing up in London, his parents soon realized that he was no ordinary child. He was homeschooled and then later sent to drawing school. Later in his life, he created famous poems including A Poison Tree, London, and The Tyger. William Blake’s quiet and unrecognized life inspired by the bible greatly affected his many writings and paintings he made during his lifetime.
His first poems about romance mentioned grey hair and exhaustion even if he wrote them while still young, and they still portray his consciousness about old age (Hoffman 29). In his 60s, Yeats began to get sickly. Regardless of his deteriorated health, he spent the last fifteen years of his life as a lively man who had an extraordinary appetite for life. He still wrote plays about spiritualism. One time after a recovery from a severe sickness, he created a sequence of dynamic poetries that recounted about an old poor fictitious female called Silly Jane as an expression of happiness. The passion for poetry kept Yeats active in his career and was determined to ensure that sickness did not hinder his
When it comes to poetry there are various ways in which people interpret it. Depending on the person and his or her experiences a poem can hit a person a certain way, especially with a great poet such as John Keats, who has written a great amount of beautiful poems that fascinated the literature world. The great poetry he has written has left him as one of the greatest poets of all time. It is unfortunate that he deceased at such a young age considering he was at his prime when it came to writing poetry. Keats writing is brilliant and can really paint several images in the reader’s head. The way he was able to paint a vivid image by the use of symbolism and the metaphors he is able to incorporate into his poems.
English poet John Keats was born in London in the year 1795. He was leave parentless at a young age. At the age of fifteen he began studying medicine in a hospital and became a licensed apothecary-surgeon in 1816. It was at that time he decided that medicine was not his calling and began to write Romantic poetry. Keats died at the young age of twenty-five but had accomplished much in those few years. In his poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" written in the year 1819, Keats expresses both romantic and philosophical genuineness. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"-that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (Keats p.760).
Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats all represent the Romantic style of literature with their unorthodox themes of nature, art, and life; and how those three points can be tied together and used for creative purposes among humankind. Art and life are counterparts; one is lacking without the other. The Romantic period was about passion; finding inspiration and beauty in things people see every day. Wordsworth found childhood memories in a familiar landscape, Blake found himself captivated by the mysteries of how the majestic tiger was created, and Keats’ urn triggered him to put his inquiries of it into poetry. Each man expressed his individual view within their works; and like many of their Romantic contemporaries, their ideas ran against the flow of their time’s societal beliefs.
One of our greatest fears is the fear of death. Immortality is something any of us would take in a heartbeat, so we do not have to face death. But this is something that we cannot run away from. Mortality is an unpleasant thought that sits in the back of our minds form our day to day lives. Yet, this fear is something that is developed more over time as we grow older. Children believe that the world is such a wonderful place, they fell invincible. They also have wonderful creative skills and imaginations which is often revealed to us when they can play one game for hours at one time. Yet, as a child ages, this imagination and creativity can disappear. This is what William Wordsworth is terrified of. Wordsworth is an English poet as well as his colleague Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first edition of Lyrical Ballads and it changed everything as mentioned Evelyn Toynton, “In early 1798, Coleridge and a little-known poet named William Wordsworth decided to publish a joint volume of their poems.” (Toynton, Evelyn). William expressed this fear of premature mortality of the imagination in each of his works, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, The Prelude, The World is Too Much with Us, and London, 1802.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, George Gordon Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were all poets in the Romantic era. They all had a love of their country and wrote about nature and revolution in some of their poems.
To begin, Wordsworth shows fear of mortality throughout the lines in the poem The World is too Much with Us. He explains that we continue to waste our lives by only being concerned with material things. Once we start caring more about money, we are lost! The speaker claims that our obsession with "getting and spending" has made us insensible to the beauties of nature. "Getting and spending" refers to the consumer culture accompanying the Industrial Revolution that was the devil incarnate for Wordsworth .(Shmoop Editorial Team) We lose our chances to do better and accomplish things when we give away our hearts because we become enthralled with love. Soon we become blind from what really matters in life and drift away from Nature. We take for granted the little things in life and become out of tune.
Authors, William Wordsworth and William Blake convey different messages and themes in their poems, “The World is Too Much with Us” and “The Tyger” consecutively by using the different mechanics one needs to create poetry. Both poems are closely related since they portray different aspects of society but the message remains different. Wordsworth’s poem describes a conflict between nature and humanity, while Blake’s poem issues God’s creations of completely different creatures. In “The World is Too Much with Us,” we figure the theme to be exactly what the title suggests: Humans are so self-absorbed with other things such as materialism that there’s no time left for anything else. In “The Tyger” the theme revolves around the question of what the Creator (God) of this creature seems to be like and the nature of good vs. evil. Both poems arise with some problem or question which makes the reader attentive and think logically about the society.
In his poem, 'Lines Written in the Early Spring,' William Wordsworth gives us insight into his views of the destruction of nature. Using personification, he makes nature seem to be full of life and happy to be living. Yet, man still is destroying what he sees as 'Nature's holy plan'; (8).
In “Ode to A Nightingale,” a prominent significance to Keats is his idea of the conflicted interplay in human life of living and death, mortal and immortal, and feeling versus the lack of feeling or inability to feel. “The ideal condition towards which Keats always strives because it is his ideal, is one in which mortal and immortal,…beauty and truth are one” (Wasserman). The narrator plunges into a dreamlike state when hearing a nightingale sing. As the nightingale sings, he shares its elation and feels the conflicting response of agony when he comes down from his dreamlike ecstasy and realizes that unlike the nightingale in his imagination, “Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird,” his life is finite (61). “Where palsy shakes a few, sad last gray hairs, where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies” (25-26).
Wordsworth is deeply involved with the complexities of nature and human reaction to it. To Wordsworth nature is the revelation of god through viewing everything that is harmonious or beautiful in nature. Man’s true character is then formed and developed through participation in this balance. Wordsworth had the view that people are at their best when they are closest to nature. Being close creates harmony and order. He thought that the people of his time were getting away from that.
When talking about poetry and Romanticism, one of the most common names that come to mind is John Keats. Keats’ lifestyle was somewhat different from his contemporaries and did not fit the Romantic era framework, this is most likely the reason he stood out from the rest. Keats wrote many poems that are still relevant, amongst them Ode to a Nightingale, which was published for the very first time in July, 1819. The realistic depth and lyrical beauty that resonates in Ode to a Nightingale is astounding. Though, his career was rather short, Keats expressed a deep yearning to rise above misery and celebrate life via his consciousness and imagination. Themes of life and death play out in a number of his poems. This essay seeks to discuss Keats’s representation of mortality and immortality, specifically in his poem Ode to a Nightingale.
Romantic poetry is the creative manifestation of the views of poets who penned during the Enlightenment era. Romantic poets sought not only to entertain with their art, but often to make grand social and political statements. Poets like William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley used their medium to shed light on perspectives that would otherwise remain unwritten due to their controversial nature. Religion, love, and politics were often the prevailing themes of romantic poetry. Some poems were rebellious against establishment, some regarded lifelong battles with religion, and some simply recalled a drug-induced hallucination of a journey to Xanadu. Regardless of the topic, romantic poets provided a much