The Prelude by William Wordsworth

Wordsworth is a poet of nature, a poet of morality. Scholar Eugene Stelzig explores this idea more throughout his article, "Wordsworth’s bleeding spots: Traumatic memories f the absent father in The Prelude." Stelzig states that at the same time as being the poet of morality, Wordsworth is also, "a poet of human continuity, of growth and development."(533) Stelzig's word choice relates to The Prelude as a whole, rather than each book in sections. The main reasoning for the autobiographical content within the psuedo-epic is to transcribe the history of what made William Wordsworth into the poet that he was and that he is viewed as. This allows the poem to act as a palimpsest. Revision after

William Wordsworth existed in a time when society and its functions were beginning to rapidly pick up. The poem that he 'Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye', gave him a chance to reflect upon his quick paced life by taking a moment to slow down and absorb the beauty of nature that allows one to 'see into the life of things'; (line 49). Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey'; takes you on a series of emotional states by trying to sway 'readers and himself, that the loss of innocence and intensity over time is compensated by an accumulation of knowledge and insight.'; Wordsworth accomplishes to prove that although time was lost along with his innocence, he

First, Wordsworth writes about the past. Much of the poem is a reflection of his earlier days. He feels quite nostalgic toward his childhood. He misses the simplicity and the naivety of when he was a young boy. Although he thinks that he enjoyed his past, he can’t quite remember that far back. Wordsworth says, “with gleams of half-extinguished thought. With many recognitions dim and faint...” The past was definitely an important part of who he is, but he can’t remember exactly what happened way back then.

William Wordsworth: Artistic Reaction to the Industrial Revolution. (Fed 14, 2000). New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, c 1936.

One of the many core tenets of the Romantic Period was the love and admiration of nature and its power. However, the way each romantic poet approached this idea varied extensively from their respective views and interpretations of nature. William Wordsworth, one of major pioneers of the Romantics, viewed nature from his own philosophical viewpoint as a formative influence superior to all. He believed in the education of man by Nature which was a prominent theme in his poems “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned.” In “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned,” Wordsworth’s use of natural imagery, metaphorical imagery, and criticism of conventional learning elevates the speaker’s message of learning from nature over academia.

Wordsworth believed that nature had an enormous impact on the human mind. Wordsworth felt that nature was humanity’s teacher. The way Wordsworth’s philosophy and others philosophers of this time period, differs from that of the Enlightenment is that the philosophers of that era felt one

William Wordsworth was a very well-known English Romantic poet in the mid 1700-1800’s. He was believed to have written “The World Is Too Much With Us” in 1802. The Industrial Revolution was up and running during that time, which influenced his writing. Clearly, the reason he wrote this poem was due to the fact that during that era the Industrial Revolution was up and booming, and material possessions and physical appearance was more important and valuable than society’s spiritual values. At the time of the romantic period several poets involved and expressed their internal emotions for nature, and its indulgence.

Romantic authors from the 18th to 19th centuries saw nature as being sublime, a force too large and beautiful to comprehend. As the movement placed emphasis on the individual’s reaction to and experience with both dreams and reality, man’s relationship with nature was extremely important to their works. The First Industrial Revolution, however, which also occurred in the 18th to 19th century, caused a massive migration from rural landscapes to urban. At the same time, as more and more people were living in cities, the middle-class was emerging with the purchasing power to buy many goods that were suddenly available. The goal of “The World is Too Much With Us,” by William Wordsworth, is to persuade a wide audience that the cost of the newly-emerging consumer culture of this time period is too heavy, and the speaker uses familiar figurative elements and a bitter,

The human tendency, described in the poem, is to foolishly “waste our powers” on material items rather than taking time to enjoy nature. Mankind is obsessed with “getting and spending” that we have become “out of tune” with the rest of the world to the point we do not anything of nature at all. The majority of the poem is a tribute to nature’s beauty so that others can experience it once industrialization consumes it. The past and memory are captured in Wordsworth’s poem through the experience of nature and its destruction from a first-person perspective. The concern of preserving the past to the Romantic poets it to pass on experiences of something beautiful that many do not take the time to see, and will soon cease to

The Romantic Movement, also known as romanticism, took place in the early 1800’s. Rather than write about the lives of ordinary people, romantics dealt with the ‘romance’ of life. They appealed to sentiment and imagination rather than reality (Miller, 534). The essence of Romanticism is a belief in the power and validity of human emotions as a means of knowing and a guide to life. Instead of following the previous periods’ belief in a ruling class as the center of power, romantics believed that power existed among all people. This was due to every humans capability to learn through emotional experiences, regardless of stature (Roberts, 1032). Romantic writers not only glorified these beliefs but the past as well, so it made sense that the Romantic Movement was partly a reaction to the Enlightenment Movement of the 1700’s. The people of the Enlightenment emphasized reason and progresses the way romantics lived off of emotion and instinct (Miller, 534). In addition to reacting to the past, Romanticism undoubtedly reflected many ideas of the, then, present (Roberts, 1032).

The Romantic Era was filled with artist and writers using nature as their muse in their writing and paintings, and William Wordsworth was the embodiment of this era. William Wordsworth’s work  Lyrical Ballads, co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was the begin of the literary portion of the Romantic Era. Wordsworth developed a love for nature at an early age, which provided as Wordsworth’s muse for many of his poems like “The World is Too Much with Us” and “Lines Written in Early Spring”. Wordsworth’s love for nature is a part of the Romantic movement, which also goes hand with one of Wordsworth’s famous works The Prelude. It shows in The Prelude and Lyrical Ballads that Wordsworth had a gift of effectively communicating with his audience.

Romanticism is a style of art or literature during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that emphasizes a love for nature, distrust of society, organized religion, celebration of the child or individual, and emotion over reason. In William Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us” Wordsworth speaks about how society is so materialistic while speaking on the significance of nature. Ironically the title of this sonnet exemplifies one of the Romantic ideas and expresses one of Wordsworth’s main points regarding nature. Wordsworth uses a connection to nature as well as religion to emphasize Romanticism in his work.

In Wordsworth’s time, the 1800’s, new phases of technology, such as electricity to run machines, were booming and people were relying more on them. With these new innovations, Wordsworth was convinced that people would stop appreciating nature while allowing technology to run their lives.

In William Wordsworth’s poem, The Prelude, he describes how he imagines London to be. He is very descriptive when he touches on what he expects upon arrival to the city, and then realizes London was not the paradise he alluded to earlier in his poem. William Wordsworth use of imagery and diction reflect the city’s natural environment, which he also uses in order to convey his feelings of anticipation and dissatisfaction with what he has discovered.

The French Revolution of the 18th Century presented a theme of hope and change for new political and artistic thought processes as it fought for equal rights over oppression. This Revolution marked the beginning of the Romantic Period, effectively inspiring poets to pursue raw emotion rather than logic or reason as in the previous age. In turn, the revolution gave great influence to several key social poets of the time such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge. Accordingly, these poets illustrated the ideals of these revolutionary beliefs to reach the public consciousness of their society through poetic portrayals of the individual achieving greatness or personal understanding through the emotion of nature. As a result, this explication will demonstrate an exploration of romantic techniques to create an interpretation of my poem while examining the elements of Romantic poetry in general based on the works of Coleridge and Wordsworth.