William Wordsworth: A study of his poetry and its reflection of Romanticism Who is William Wordsworth? Why is he called a Romantic poet? How does his poetry reflect Romanticism?

“Lyrical Ballads” established such a new theory of poetry that it is used to mark the end of the Neo-Classical period of literature and the beginning of the Romantic period. One of the most touching pieces of poetry in the collection is William Wordsworth’s “What is a Poet?” This poem spoke to the core of my being and broke down barriers that I had been building in my mind years. It had such powerful effects on me because, I have always enjoyed the beauty of poetry but my relationship with it has dealt mostly with the rhythm in rhyme. I’ve been performing live with musicians at open mics for eight years now. I never enjoyed being called a rapper and I never considered myself an actual poet because, I have no recordings nor published poetry to show for. Even though poetry has always been a part of my life, I’ve consider it more of a personal release than my life’s work. In “What is a Poet”, William Wordsworth described the poetic soul with such depth and accuracy that while I read it, I became completely aware of the fact that I am a true poet. I have lived with this art form and chased the freedom in it for years because recording has always felt so slavish and mechanical. William Wordsworth’s ability to reflect upon his own poetry and the practice of poetry in general was absolutely astounding. In this poem he expressed the qualities of a poet, the obligations of a poet, and the common sentiments of poets alike with such perspective that every word still profoundly

The Penguin Books of Romantic Poetry includes a collections of romantic poetry from later eighteen centuries to the early nineteenth century. At the peak of Romanticism, there were many social and political changes occurred including the French Revolution, Napoleon’s expansion in Europe, the Congress of Vienna, the conflict between conservatism and liberalism, Industrial revolution and so on. Romantic poets used poems to express their emotions of their love for nature, longing for the ancient legends, and they tried to use their emotions and feelings to understand the world around them including the French Revolution, slavery, industrial revolution and the Napoleonic war. However, after the Revolution of 1848, the wave of romanticism died out and realism emerged.

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

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.

If you read the through the poem, just the lines on the paper, you can clearly see that Wordsworth is upset at the contemporary society and how materialistic the human race has become. This is shown in the lines “Getting and spending, we lay waste to our powers” and “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon”. Here he is speaking of how humans only want more materialistic thing,

William Wordsworth’s poetry was renowned for its connection to nature. As we learnt in class, his father became very ill when he traveled into nature and the

Wordsworth’s ideas that prompted the Romantic Period were due to his upbringing and experiences as a student. Born in the spring of 1770, Wordsworth grew up with four siblings in England along the Derwent River, exposing him early on to nature’s beauty. He drew inspiration for his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, from his schooling at Cockermouth, as well as from his education in Hawkshead, where he and his brother attended school. He then attended Cambridge, using his experiences there to note his changing ideas of his education in the third book of The Prelude.

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

Wordsworth, considered the greatest Romantic poet. Going against traditional poetry with his good friend Coleridge which was proper style, proper words, with subject matter. They defied it the used witty figures of speech, effusive praise with tragic complaints, oh the audacity. Since they did this though they helped build the Romanticism Movement. One of Wordsworth’s poems is Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey or for short Tintern Abbey. This poem is about Wordsworth’s trip after 5 long years back to an old, abandoned Abbey in Wales with his sister Dorothy. He tells us about the present of being there, to the past when he first came to this abandoned Abbey, back to the present talking to his sister about it and the future.

“In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth fears the loss of his genial spirit and seems to be worried about his poetic ability. Similarly, Coleridge, in Dejection, admits that his poetic originality is at stake” (Magnuson 15). In the forth stanza, Wordsworth writes, “Nor perchance / If I were not thus taught, should I the more / Suffer my genial spirits to decay” (113-115). Likewise, Coleridge, in the third stanza, writes, “My genial spirits fail” (39). Actually, both Coleridge and Wordsworth admit that they have been facing problems with nature. In the beginning of the third stanza, one can feel the sad tone of Wordsworth’s poem. The poet tells us how he lost part of his feelings toward nature. His ideas become “dim” and “faint.” He writes, “And now with gleams of half extinguished thought, / With many recognitions dim and faint, / And somewhat of a sad perplexity” (59-61). He cannot feel nature the same way he used to do as a child. Describing the way he was as a child, the poet says, “I cannot paint / What I was then” (76-77). Similarly, Coleridge asserts that he used to view nature differently as a child. In the beginning of the sixth stanza, he says, “There was a time when, though my path was rough, / This joy within me dallied with distress, / And all misfortunes were but the stuff”

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.

Before Wordsworth began writing his revolutionary new style of poetry, all preceding poetry had a very different style. The reason these poems were classed as revolutionary was because he believed that romantic poetry should describe "incidents of common life" and ordinary people and were written in deliberately plain words. It was what

Wordsworth felt that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (172) in his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” stated that he felt an individual could explore and experience the intense emotion that poetry offers.. Wordsworth saw the grand lay of nature is evident from his early years. In Wordsworth’s

William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, West Cumberland in the year 1770. Many years later he died at the age of 80 on April 23, 1850. Wordsworth lived a life full of struggles and pain but many accomplishments. He lost his mother at the age of 8 and was sent to a school in Hawkshead. In 1791 after he graduated with a degree at Cambridge University, he became an avid supporter of the French Revolution which seemed to him to promise a “glorious renovation” of society. He then married a French woman named Annette Vallon and had a daughter Caroline. Soon after Caroline’s birth Wordsworth had an emotional breakdown because the lack of money he had forced him to return to England. Years later he remarried a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson, and had five children in which only three survived. In 1805, his favorite brother drowned and in 1810 his sister Dorothy's physical and mental state declined however, with the agony he grew up with underlied many of his greatest poems. He remained famous, as he was

Where Wordsworth focused too on love and nature at first, he then took on more spiritual subjects. Further, if we assume that Wordsworth’s imitation of “The Retreat” was intentional, then Vaughan may have even been a poetic model (in some sense) for Wordsworth later in life. True, Wordsworth is not generally considered a religious poet; he would never have originally considered Vaughan a model because of the latter’s extreme religiosity. Yet if these two poems don’t echo in godly gestures per se, they do in a more spiritual sense—and perhaps Wordsworth, as a man confronted with his own mortality, found Vaughan’s treatise on the spirit’s immortality a sympathetic sentiment. Thus by comparing the two, we also might better understand Wordsworth’s poetic progression.