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William Wordsworth's Views Of Nature : Nature As An Unconventional Teacher

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Nature as an Unconventional Teacher 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's utilizes natural imagery in “The Tables Turned” and lack thereof in “Expostulation and Reply” to heighten nature's superiority in contrast to scholarly learning. The first line of the “The Tables Turned” the speaker urges his Friend to “quit [their] books” (1) and escape the “toil and trouble” of reading. In stanza two of “The Tables Turned,” the speaker use of natural imagery paints a picture of the magnifice seen in nature when describing a beautiful evening scene of “A freshening lustre mellow /. . . all the long green fields /. . . first sweet evening yellow” (6-8). The content of the second stanza after the first is applied in such a way to suggest the speaker is describing the

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