The Command to Nature in Wordsworth and Post-Enlightenment Lyric (original) (raw)

IN THE REVOLUTIONARY DELIGHTS, RE-READING PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS: A ROMANTIC MANIFESTO

RESEARCH SCHOLAR, 2016

According to A.C. Bradley, " there have been greater poets than Wordsworth but none more original. " The originality of Wordsworth makes the relation between his work and age peculiarly complex. However with the emphasis on the importance of imagination, predominance of feeling and emotion, spontaneity, nature and common man, the Lyrical Ballads simply eulogizes Wordsworth's subtle engineering and delicate art craft ship in his works. This paper makes an attempt to rediscover and re-frame the phrase of Romantic appeal of common creativity in today's language of literature. Romantic Movement in literature was a vehement reaction against the eighteenth century rationalism. It was a deliberate and sweeping revolt against the literary principles of the Age of Reason. Just as Dryden and Pope had rejected the romantic tradition of the Elizabethans as crude and irregular and had adopted classical or more correctly neo-classical principles of French literature in their writing so, now Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their turn, rejected the neo-classical principles in favor of the romantic. Now what is that distinguishes the classic from romantic? Simply put, classical writing is characterized by reason or commonsense, expressed in a restrained style, that is to say, which has order, proportion and finish. Reason dominated life and literature. Emotion and imagination were pushed to the background. Romantic writing, on the other hand, is characterized by imagination, expressed in a style more or less free of restraint-a style, that is to say, which may be simple or grand, picturesque or passionate, depending on the mood or temperament of the writer. In other words, classicism subordinates matter to form; romanticism subordinates form to matter. Classicism stands for regimentation, regulation and authority. The causes and character of the Romantic Movement have been subjects of endless debate and discussion. And to justify all the features of this movement, we have to delve deep into the great product of the age-Wordsworth`s Preface To Lyrical ballads-which gave a new orientation to literary ideals. It is a critical document of abiding significance.

Preferential Treatment of Nature in Romantic Poetry

International Journal of Advanced Research, 2022

Love for nature is one of the perennial characteristics perceived in Romantic poetry. English Romantic poets employ nature as an influential theme in their poetry: however their treatment of nature does not sound to be similar. This article aims at differentiating English Romantic poets preferential treatment of nature succinctly by including ten poems of five noted English Romantic poets, namely Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. This article concludes that nature for Wordsworth is a sort of God or Goddess for Coleridge it is an expression of the mystical power for Byron it is a reflection of mankind for Shelley it is a healing power and for Keats it is a source of sensuousness inflaming sensual pleasures.

University of Jordan The Representation of Nature in Romantic Writing

The Representation of Nature in Romantic Writing : William Blake , William Wordsworth , Lord Byron, 2020

This paper explores how the concept of 'Nature' appears in 19 th Century English literature by analysing the portrayal of nature in some of William Blake's, William Wordsworth's and Lord Byron's literary works. Nature is a recurrent thematic element in several literary movements, therefore , this paper will focus on the notion that the 19 th Century English authors utilize , as they depict this vision of nature in their literary works in an unprecedented way. In addition , this paper provides brief analyses of Blake's, Wordsworth's and Byron's literary excerpts to compare and contrast them in order to appreciate the similarities and differences in the ways in which nature was conceived by different poets in the English period of Romanticism .

Nature: A Recurrent Theme in Wordsworth’s Poetry

Scholars International Journal of Linguistics and Literature, 2021

This article attempts to deal with nature as a recurrent theme in William Wordsworth‟s poetry. He is one of the greatest romantic English poets. He views nature as a living entity that is a source of pleasure and education for him. He has given us sufficient heart-touching and beautiful poems that are the enduring treasures of romanticism, but only a few popular poems that reveal the growth and development of his love for nature, his concept of nature mysticism, joy in nature, universal love in nature, spiritual unity of nature, bond between nature and man, soothing influence and healing power of nature and nature‟s teaching potentiality have been taken from the corpus of his vast works under consideration for the study. Most of his poems can be well understood and analyzed through a vigilant consideration regarding his treatment of nature.

Freedom and Constraint: The Blank Verse of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads

2017

In his preface to the 1800 Edition of Lyrical Ballads , William Wordsworth argued powerfully that the language of poetry is not, and cannot be, distinct from that of common prose. And yet, while Wordsworth’s choice of vocabulary, tone and subject matter in this collection was prosaic to the point of being revolutionary, one primary distinction between poetry and prose was left untouched: the meter. This paper explores the seeming contradiction between Wordsworth’s assertion in his preface and his strict adherence to the laws of poetic meter within the collection. I argue that this contradiction is intentional, and in proposing it, Wordsworth pushes his reader to adopt a characteristically Romantic vision of the state of humanity and its relationship to poetry: in an industrialized society, our state is one of perpetual tension between the essential and the artificial. It is this dynamic tension between freedom and constraint that metric verse is intended to exemplify. By juxtaposing...

The "Other" Wordsworth: Philosophy, Art, and the Pursuit of the "Real" in Lyrical Ballads

This essay attempts to demonstrate the Preface to Lyrical Ballads‟ critical and historical relevance, first, by considering its historical reception, and second, by reconsidering one of the key concepts of the Preface, the notion of the “real,” within the larger context of this reception. During his lifetime, Wordsworth was considered in two different respects: one, as the poet of simple ballads; the other, as the speculative, inwardly driven poet of The Excursion. I argue that this second model, expounded first by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, has influenced such major critics as Hartman, Pottle, and Bloom, particularly in their interpretations of Wordsworth‟s early career. By considering the “other” Wordsworth, the Wordsworth of the Preface, the dialectic can be historically resituated. Ultimately, I wish to rethink the Preface by importing the idea of philosophy into what has hitherto been considered to be not a philosophical work.

Who’s afraid of the lyric mode? Romanticism’s long tail and Adamson’s ecopoetics.

TEXT Special Issue Series No. 41, Romanticism and Contemporary Australian Writing: Legacies and Resistances Edited by Stephanie Green and Paul Hetherington

Although ecocriticism has roots in Romanticism, much discourse around ecopoetry has come to hinge on a distancing from a 'Romantic', 'ego-driven' style of poetry, seen to be unethical. Such positions problematize lyric poetry, given its strong association with both Romanticism and the formal centrality of the self. This paper contends that lyric is often conflated with a reductive view of Romanticism and seeks to uncouple the form from such views. Looking to the work of Australian poet Robert Adamson, lyric is framed here as a performative mode rather than a genre, and is presented as an engaged type of ethical discourse which functions via reader answerability. Maintaining a Merleau-Pontean ontology as regards the lyric subject and the dynamic between word and world, and drawing upon Barthes's use of the term 'place', the paper concludes that the lyric can function as a decidedly ethical ecopoetry, in which the place of lyric is also the place of the ecopoetic.