For Shelley, poetry moves beyond descriptive communicability; it defers meaning, destabilizes understanding, and defamiliarizes perception. Poetry "awakens and enlarges the mind," he says in A Defense of Poetry, "by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thoughts" (961). The poet-figure envisions new realities and new emotions, the likes of which invalidate, if not eradicate, intimations of referential meaning. "Poetry," Shelley states in his Defense, "lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar" (961).[1]
In "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and in "Mont Blanc," Shelley offers an intriguing, though perplexing, look at the functioning of the human mind under the influence of nature, inspiration, and poetic creativity. Composed during a tour of the vale of Chamonix between June 22 and August 29, 1816, nearly twenty years after the composition of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," Shelley's poems can be read, as some critics have done, as a "Wordsworthian experience" (Brinkley 45). Shelley and his literary precursor share a similar interest in some of the ways the mind works in and reacts to Nature. But whereas Wordsworth finds solace in Nature -- a setting wherein he behaves as a "lover of the meadows and the woods / And mountains, and of all that we behold / From this green earth ("Tintern Abbey," 104-106)[2] -- Shelley ultimately finds it spiritually and intellectually dissatisfying. Although they both use the natural setting and landscape as their subject, the parallels between Shelley's poems and Wordsworth's remain somewhat perfunctory.
Nature, for Shelley, is nefarious. The universe of Shelley's "Intellectual Beauty" and "Mont Bla...
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McNulty, J. Bard. "Self-Awareness in the Making of 'Tintern Abbey'." The Wordsworth Circle 12:2 (1981 Spring): 97-100.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Alastor." Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 834-852.
--- "Hymn To Intellectual Beauty." Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 852-855.
--- "Mont Blanc." Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 855-860.
--- A Defence of Poetry. Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 956-969.
Storey, Mark. The Problem of Poetry in the Romantic Period. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc, 2000.
Wordsworth, William. "Tintern Abbey." Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 240-244.
--- 1802 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Romanticism, 1st ed. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. 250-269.
Everett, Nicholas From The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamiltong. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Copyright 1994 by Oxford University Press.
69. Print. Strand, Mark, and Eavan Boland. The Making of a Poem: a Norton Anthology of Poetic
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Thomas." The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. 101-10. Print.
(ll. 19-24) Wordsworth’s famous and simple poem, “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” expresses the Romantic Age’s appreciation for the beauty and truth that can be found in a setting as ordinary as a field of daffodils. With this final stanza, Wordsworth writes of the mind’s ability to carry those memories of nature’s beauty into any setting, whether city or country. His belief in the power of the imagination and the effect it can have on nature, and vice a versa, is evident in most of his work. This small
Wolfson, Susan and Peter Manning (eds.). The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Romantics and Their Contemporaries. Volume 2A. New York: Longman, 1999.
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O’Clair. Modern Poems. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1989.
Strand, Mark and Evan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New
Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California, 1998.
Allison, Barrows, Blake, et al. eds. The Norton Anthology Of Poetry . 3rd Shorter ed. New York: Norton, 1983. 211.
1 Modern Poetry. Third Edition. Norton. I am a naysayer. 2003. The 'Secondary' of the 'Secondary' of the Williams, William.
Reisman, Rosemary M. C, and Robert L. Snyder. Romantic Poets. 4th ed. Ipswich, Mass: Salem
In "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," William Wordsworth explains the impact of Nature from Tintern Abbey in his every day life. "Tintern Abbey" shows the great importance of nature to Wordsworth in his writings, love for life, and religion. The memories he has of Tintern Abbey make even the darkest days full of light.
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.