Wordsworth and Vaughan Essay

In the romantic era, British authors and poets focused on nature and its influence. Two of those poets, Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, wrote many pieces on the beauty of nature and their personal experiences with the beaches of England. In “Far on the sands” and “It is a beauteous evening,” Smith and Wordsworth describe their respective experiences on the shore at sunset. Both authors use structure, theme, allusions, and imagery to effectively convey their perceptions of nature. While the sonnets share a setting and the topics of nature and tranquility, Smith’s has a focus on introspection and Wordsworth’s is centered around religion. These have different focuses which achieve different effects on the reader.

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

Previously in the commencement of my essay, I had posed a question along the lines of “How did Wordsworth and Muir come to this point of pure and utter infatuation with the nature that surrounds them?” Throughout the close analysis and investigation I have done studying the two, I have come to discover that these masters in their craft of writing have an interesting point-of-view that differs from the average individual; they simply have a deeper rooted connection to their environment whether that be due solely to the fact that they just love nature or that they approach life in a more literary manner to the point that even the most mere blade of grass can be surrounded by just the right words to be glorified in such a way that it sounds even

Wordsworth was brought up in the Church of England and was a pious believer. However, in his poem, Wordsworth states that he would, “rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn,” than be disconnected with nature (9-10). This a further testament to Wordsworth’s commitment to nature and what he would be willing to give up in order to remain connected to it. In reference to Wordsworth’s statement that he would prefer paganism to disconnection Aubrey says, “Wordsworth is saying, presumably, that superstition is preferable to worldliness or apathy if it preserves the life of the imagination and our sense of nature as a living presence with purposes akin to our own.” In Wordsworth’s eyes, a life apart from the institution of belief he was raised in is much preferable to the death of all that nature embodies for

For most poets of the Romantic Age, nature played an invaluable role in their works. Man’s existence could be affected and explained by the presence and portrayal of the external nature surrounding it. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are no different from the other Romantic poets, and their works abound with references to nature and its correlation to humanity. Specifically, Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage” and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” share the theme of nature affecting man, although essential differences exist in their ideas regarding how it affects man. These two

In this excerpt from “The Prelude”, Wordsworth’s speaker exhibits three major responses to his experiences in nature. Each response is quite different from the previous and just as- if not more- vividly represented.

Metaphysical poetry comes into being as a kind of rebellion against the precedent of Golden Poetry. "Not only is it extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry, but difficult to decide what poets practise it and in which of their verses" (Eliot.)

Written over the course of several years beginning in 1802, Ode to Intimations by William Wordsworth is one of the most revered poems of the Romantic period. The sonnet explores man 's relationship with nature and the gradual loss of the glorious life of childhood. In William Wordsworth’s “Ode to Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” the speaker specifically uses the memories of the innocence and life of his childhood to articulate his ideas of devotion and connection with nature.

These dissenters questioned religion-saw religion with its human tainted touch and the inadequacies that focused more on the materialistic than spiritual-as what religion is supposed to achieve. William Wordsworth is one of the Romantic Era writers that spoke of nature with zeal and reverence with a religious tone. By its very nature, poetic imagery links human thoughts and emotions intimately with the external world. The pathetic fallacy is used here by Wordsworth. It appears that nature is a blank page that takes on the paints of the human feeling. William Wordsworth takes nature as a soul invading figure so far transcendentally as to make it his religion pointing to the idea of a philosophical turn suggesting an atheistic and also a pantheistic world view. Wordsworth writes in his poem ‘Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey”:

T. S. Eliot and William Wordsworth were both well-known poets, born 100 years apart; both were famous poets in their own right. Both men were influential in changing the face of poetry as the world had known it. Eliot looked at poetry in a Modernistic view, while Wordsworth was a writer who chose a Romantic view. Eliot’s view seems to be one of disconnect, where Wordsworth’s view is one of emotion and feelings.

Enright’s introduction to the Poet’s of the 1950s criticized Thomas’s poetry on the familiar ground that it lacked thought: “Perhaps the kind of admiration which Thomas received encouraged him to leave “thinking” to the New Verse Poets; but poetry is like a human body in needing bones as well as flesh and blood”(Enright, Poet of the 1950s). A similar idea can be found in Davie’s Articulate Energy published in 1955, which looks back to a period in English history, the eighteenth century , where ‘strong sense’ was as common as terms as ‘strong feelings’. Davie sees Romantic and Modernist practice as having destroyed meaning and argument into poetry by over emphasizing the importance of images. He is able to admit that in some poetry notably that of Ezra Pound such practice has had beneficial effects; but one poet whose pursuit of images he will not tolerate is Dylan Thomas: ‘a sonnet by Dylan Thomas is unacceptable even on Hulme’s terms. When concrete images are crowded upon each other, they lose their concreteness. The milk is soured by the magic, the bread has lost its tang, and the clod its volume. The things will not stand still, but fluctuate and swim like weeds in a

The metaphysical poets have immense power and capability to wonder the reader and cajole inventive perspective through paradoxical images, subtle argument, innovative syntax and imagery from art, philosophy and religion implying an extended metaphor known as conceit. The term “metaphysical” broadly applied to English and European poets of the seventeenth century was used by Augustan poets John Dryden and Samuel Johnson to reprove those poets for their “unnaturalness”. John Dryden was the first to use the term metaphysical in association with John Donne as he “affects the metaphysics.” Goethe, likewise, wrote, “the unnatural, that too is natural” and metaphysical poets are studied for their intricacy and originality. It will not be irrelevant and absurd to say, “Metaphysics in poetry is the fruit of the Renaissance tree, becoming over-ripe and approaching putrescence” (C. S. Lewis). Scholars described the characteristics of metaphysical poetry from different point of view. They, in fact, lay out the essence of metaphysical poem, as does R.S. Hillyer to call “ Loosely, it has taken such meanings as these--metaphysical poetry as difficult, philosophical, obscure, ethereal, involved, supercilious, ingenious, fantastic and incongruous.”

Poetry may be defined in many ways: for different people arising from different backgrounds, (levels of education, beliefs, culture, and family), poetry may be viewed in many perspectives that suit their familiarity of understanding. For T.S. Eliot, poetry is an art which is controlled to go beyond reporting feelings of moments, into something extended. The ‘extended’ feeling, that now has meaning beyond just an expression for emotion, is then able to live for itself, separate from its creator. Hence, poetry becomes an “escape from emotion and personality” as the personality that it derives from gives birth to something independent. Eliot is right to define poetry as something representing an extended feeling, as the beauty of poetry is to convey meaning from something unpoetic such as pure madness; however, he failed to include that to give meaning - an independence, to a feeling is to incorporate the poet’s psychology. It takes a poet’s intelligence to be able to transfer the unexplainable to something understood by others. A poem is not just a medium of escape, it is an extension of the poet’s psyche as their experiences and knowledge of their world is what helps them craft and define the shape of their work.

While some may argue that this may just be a coincidence purely due to the style in which these two authors write, looking back on Wordsworth’s writing after observing that of Eliot provides a sharper contrast of views and ideas of how literature specifically works. In Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth uses the sublime power of nature to converse with the reader about the emotion one can experience when humbling themselves and observing the forces of nature. First Wordsworth shows his romantic perspective when he states “Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs / That on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect / The landscape with the quiet of the sky (Tintern Abby, 5-8). Again this is Wordsworth’s famed ability to bring out the sublime feelings brought about through the simple observation of nature. This is more than typical of a romantic writer, yet if you observed the emotional distance that is apparent in Eliot’s writing it would not be incorrect to assume the modernist writer would have little interest in nature or the sublime and the emotions which Wordsworth claims it elicits. Rather Eliot would argue the decay of modern society has made him numb to such a simple romantic ideal.

All words, phrases and sentences (or just simply images) which make up this poem seem to, in Levi-Strauss’ words, “be a valeur symbolique zero [and the signifier] can take on any value required ”, meaning that the images Eliot uses do not have one fixed signification and consequently conjure up thought-provoking ideas that need to be studied (qtd. in