WILLIAM
WORDSWORTH(1770-1850)
A Poet’s Quest for Nature or
for His Self?`
NOTE: ROMANTICISM FROM
DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES

Deconstruction & Feminism
- what Romanticism really valorizes is not
nature, but the human/male imagination,
human language and male quest;
 New Historicism the ideological function
of romantic
imagination and pastoral was to disguise the
exploitative nature of contemporary social
relations;
 Bate –
 Wordsworth
repositioned in a tradition of
environmental consciousness, according to
which human well-being is understood to be
coordinate with the ecological health of the
land. (p. 162)
WHAT IS NATURE TO YOU?
… nature then/ … To me was all in
all.… I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime …
OUTLINE

Introduction


Wordsworth as a Poet and as a Person
The Lyrical Ballads
“Tintern Abbey”
 The Immortality Ode
 Short Poems

WORDSWORTH THE POET -- 1797 - 1807
Wordsworth in 1798,
about the time he began
The Prelude.
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Image source: Wikipedia
1791 2nd visit to France,
disillusioned.
1797 He made friends with
Coleridge; lived near him in
Sommerset
1798 Published Lyrical
Ballads
1798-1799 German Period (Lucy
Poems)  Lake District
1805 completed The Prelude,
without publishing it.
1807 published Poems in Two
Volumes, also Lucy Poems.
WORDSWORTH THE PERSON
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Portrait of William
1795 Received a legacy
Wordsworth by Benjamin
sufficient to keep him
Robert Haydon
independent, and settled
down with his sister Dorothy
1798 tour to Tintern Abbey
1802 Received another sum
of money, which allowed him
to marry Mary Hutchinson;
Dorothy continued to live
with the couple and grew
close to Mary
1843
made poet Laureate
1850
died (80 years old);
The Prelude published.
Image source: Wikipedia
LYRICAL BALLADS
Significance
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Style: break with the
conventional poetical tradition
of the 18th century, i.e. with
classicism; in the language of
“the rustics”
Content: about common life;
“spontaneous overflow of
powerful feeling, recollected in
tranquility” --memory (e.g.
Daffodil poem, Tintern Abbey)
Poet: A Poet is “a man
speaking to men : a man, it is
true, endued with more lively
sensibility, more enthusiasm
and tenderness…”
Three Editions
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1798 – published anonymously
1800 – Coleridge laboriously
transcribed all of W’s poems,
while “Wordsworth… refused to
include "Christabel," …, and
insisted on adding to the
preface an apology for the
‘great defects’ of "The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner," which he
had always regarded with
scorn.” (Toynton)
1802
WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE
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Although it is probably an exaggeration to
suggest, as the critic I. A. Richards does, that
"Coleridge was Wordsworth's creator," Coleridge
certainly gave him a metaphysical perspective, a
largeness of understanding, that Wordsworth
might never have found for himself. His previous
work had drawn almost exclusively on
instinctive sympathies; now [the writing of
“Tintern Abbey”] it took on the language of
transcendence. (Toynton)
Coleridge: … "No Hope of me! absol. Nuisance!
God's mercy is it a dream!" … "Wordsworth,
Wordsworth has given me up.” (Toynton)
WHAT ENDED THEIR FRIENDSHIP &
COLLABORATION?
Next week:
Pandaemonium
(2000)
Wordsworth
1. “Egotistic sublime”
2. Devoted to writing, a loving
husband, brother and father
Coleridge
1. Brilliant and warmhearted
Toynton
2. With laudanum addiction, the
periodic torments of withdrawal,
guilt, self-doubt, in combination
with many physical ailments
both real and imaginary
“TINTERN ABBEY”
Lines Composed a Few Miles
above Tintern Abbey
-- A tourist poem about the
picaturesque?
-- A nature poem? Or about memory?
-- A political poem or a religious poem
with unmediated contact with a
pantheistic deity
TINTERN ABBEY AND
RIVER WYE
Source: Wikipedia
Left: Tintern Abbey viewed from the far (English) bank of the River Wye
Right: The Chancel and Crossing of Tintern Abbey, Looking towards the East Window by J. M. W. Turner, 1794
SAMUEL IRELAND, PICTURESQUE VIEW
OF RIVER WYE (1797)
WILLIAM GILPIN
OBSERVATIONS ON THE RIVER WYE.
TINTERN ABBEY: STRUCTURE
Stanza 1 Five years have past…[present]
• I see the river and the landscape again.
These beauteous forms …[these 5
Stanza 2 years]
• I have owed to them…”sensations sweet/Felt in the
blood, and felt along in the heart”; “feelings of
unremembered pleasure”; serene and blessed mood.
Stanza 3
If this /Be but a vain belief, ……[these 5
years]
• ..oh! how oft /…have I turned to thee, O Sylvan Wye
TINTERN ABBEY: STRUCTURE (2)
Stanza 4
And now, … [present & future]
• The picture of the mind revives again; while here I
stand—with pleasing thoughts for the present and for
future years.
Stanza 4
…nature then to me was “all in all” [past & present]
• That time is past. … For I have learned/to look on
nature …hearing oftentimes/ The still sad music of
humanity”
Stanza 5
Nor perchance, if I were not thus taught…[present &
future]
• Should I the more/Suffer my genial spirits to decay.
• For thou are here with me…
“TINTURN ABBEY”: DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Describes the interactions of the self and
nature first, and with Dorothy
a. stanza 1: Present “Once again/Do I behold
these steep and lofty cliffs. . .” Self cliff;
sky, cottage  larger landscape;
b. Stanza 2 & 3: in a city
c. Stanza 4: past and present
d. Stanza 5: Dorothy
2. Wordsworth’s omission of the abbey?
-- To avoid the picturesque or to avoid the
implied social relations of the landscape
1.
WORDSWORTH &
THE PICTURESQUE
Bate draws upon Wordsworth as an exemplar of
ecocritical thinking, for Wordsworth did not
view nature in Enlightenment terms - as that
which must be tamed, ordered, and utilised but as an area to be inhabited and reflected
upon.
 e.g. ll 94-102. “refuses to carve the world into
object and subject; the same force animates
both consciousness and ‘all things.’”
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PARODY OF THE PICTURESQUE

Dr. Syntax In Search of the PICturesque
(William Comb)
The aesthete bemuses the locals
WORDSWORTH ON THE PICTURESQUE
 “He
[another poet] used to go out with a
pencil and a tablet, and note what struck
him, thus: ‘an old tower,’ ‘a dashing
stream,’ ‘a green slope,’ and make a
picture out of it . . .But Nature does not
allow an inventory to be made of her
charms! He should have left his pencil
behind, and gone forth in a meditative
spirit; and, on a later day, he should have
embodied in verse not all that he had
noted, but what he best remembered of
the scene, . . . “ (qtd in Bate 148)
SOCIAL REALITY
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Observations on the River Wye . . . Relative
Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (Rev. William
Gilpin) ”the ruined abbey, however picturesque,
served as a habitat for beggars and the
wretchedly poor; also the Wye, in the tidal
portion downstream from the abbey, had noisy
and smoky iron-smelting furnaces along its
banks, while in some places the water was oozy
and discolored.” (Norton Anthology “The
Romantic Period: Topics) (See also this page)
EXAMPLES II: NATURE &
CHILDHOOD ROMANTICIZED?
 Immortality
Ode: Structure –
 Stanzas I-II: past glory vs. his present sense of
loss;
 Stanzas III – IV: his confirmation of the
present beings while missing the visionary
gleam bespoken by a tree, a field and the
pansy;
 Stanzas V-VII – the process of human (our)
growth and learning of different ‘arts,’ lies and
imitation in the lap of ‘Earth’
 Stanza VIII – XI – reconfirmation of both past
affections, recollections and truths and the
present natural beings and child (child --we)
WORDSWORTH
Immortality Ode
IMMORTALITY ODE
Do you agree that the child is father of the man?
 How is nature presented in this poem?
 Who are the “you” addressed in the poem?
 How does Wordsworth resolve the issue of inevitable
aging, forgetting and death?
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IMMORTALITY ODE: STRUCTURE
Dialectic between
Present beauty vs. past glories
The things which I have seen I now can see
no more.
1
5
2
…there hath pass'd away a glory from the
earth.
4
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
IMMORTALITY ODE: STRUCTURE
Process of forgetting. “Thou little child”
Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
6
9
7
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
8
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
IMMORTALITY ODE: STRUCTURE
Conclusion:
We in thought will join your throng;
10
Q
11
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquish'd one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
Q
How is a child “best philosopher”?
the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
DISCUSSION FOCUS
Stanzas 5-7 – give examples of the process of
forgetting
 Stanzas 10-11 – what are Wordsworth’s solution
to aging and the loss of childhood glories?
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WORDSWORTH’S
Shorter Poems
WE ARE SEVEN &
A SLUMBER DID MY SPIRIT SEAL
We Are Seven
1.
2.
3.
How does the poem
represent the child?
And the speaker?
Why does the speak
keep asking the
child questions?
A Slumber Did My Spirit
Seal
1.
2.
3.
What tone does the
poem’s speaker take?
What does the
“slumber” imply?
What kind of “thing”
is she?
What effect is
achieved in its having
just one sentence?
Its predominantly
iambic meter?
“I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD”
See Dorothy’s journal here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Wandered_Lonely
_as_a_Cloud
 How are the speaker and the daffodils set in
contrast?
 Is the poem all set in past tense?
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I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD
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I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
WORKS CITED
Toynton, Evelyn. "A delicious torment: the
friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge."
Harper's Magazine June 2007: 88+. Literature
Resource Center. Web. 22 Sep. 2012.
 Bate, Johnathan. The Song of the Earth.
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