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Similarities Between Wordsworth And Tintern Abbey

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Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” when compared to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner argues that the poet creates meaning from surroundings by offering a background story or outright pointing to a moral of the circumstances. However, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner states that the reader is the one to decipher meaning from the circumstances; the poet can only create the story, but ultimately leaves it up to the readers to derive the meaning for themselves. “Tintern Abbey” is told from the narrator’s point of view as Wordsworth. In it, he observes the picturesque beauty of nature contrasted with man-made structures like overgrown fields and a dilapidated church. He expresses his feelings of how such a sight, “In hours of weariness, …show more content…

The figurative language has to be simplified – but still beautiful enough to remain poetry – so that the truth conveyed is a universally understood experience. If the language is too lofty, then the truth behind the poem is not conveyed and the reader cannot experience what Wordsworth has experienced the same way. As he explained in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, “the essential passions of the heart…speak a plainer and more emphatic language,” and therefore purifying the common language describes the beautiful truth of nature …show more content…

The point of such poems like “Tintern Abbey” or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was so that the poet could “transfer from our inward nature a human interest and semblance of truth sufficient to procure from these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (567). It was so that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner could be written with enough details to describe what was happening, even with added side notes for additional clarification, but leave it up the reader to deduce the meaning for themselves by the feelings the poem might inspire within them. Coleridge’s critique for Wordsworth was that his use of “extra-colloquial” language made his poems too common an experience to incite greater emotion within the reader

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