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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770 - 1850) - Coggle Diagram
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
(1770 - 1850)
STYLE
POET = has a great sensibility and an ability to see into the heart of things. The power of imagination enables him to communicate his knowledge, so that he becomes a
teacher
POET'S TASKES = consists in drawing attention to the ordinary things of life, to the humblest people. He almost always used blank verse, though he proved skilful at several verse forms
POETRY
Poetry was a solitary act, originating in the ordinary.
In his "Preface" he explained that the subject matter should deal with everyday situations or incidents and with ordinary people
LANGUAGE = should be simple
In humble rural life man is nearer to his own purer passions
The poet is a man among men.
LYRICAL BALLADS
with Coleridge
They decided:
WORDSWORT = would deal with man, nature and everyday things trying to make them interesting for the reader
COLERIDGE = would write about the supernatural and mystery making them seem real
POET OF NATURE
His poetry offers a detailed account of the complex interaction between man and nature, of the influences, insights, emotions and sensations which arise from this contact
CHILD
CHILDHOOD = state of man's life which is
closer to NATURE and GOD.
MAN = he can rediscover God throught the
nature
SOUL = comes from GOD
RECOLLECTION IN
TRANQUILLITY
All genuine poetry takes its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquillity
, so that what we read in the poem results from the active, vital relationship "of present to past experience". Through the re-creative power of memory, the emotion is re-produced and purified in poetic form so that a second emotion, ‘kindred'’ to the first one, is generated
IMAGINATION
"imagination" was synonymous with "intuition"
INTUITION = the power to see into the life of things
SENSES and MEMORY
NATURE = was also a world of sense perceptions --- he used especially the
sensibility of the eye and ear
.
He was influenced by the associationist philosopher David Hartley (1705 - 1757) in his belief that
our moral character develops during childhood as a result of the pleasure and pain caused by our physical experiences
.
SENSATIONS = lead to simple thoughts, which later combine into complex and organised ideas.
MEMORY = is a major force in the process of growth of the poets mind and moral character.
LIFE
1770 = he was born in Cumberland in the English Lake District, a beautiful region near the Scottish border
1795 = he received an inheritance and moved to Dorset with his sister Dorothy, who remained his most faithful friend.
In the same year he met
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
. Their friendship proved crucial to the development of English Romantic poetry: they produced a collection of poems called
Lyrical Ballads
which appeared anonymously in 1798. The second edition in 1800 also contained Wordsworth's famous ‘Prefacè, which was to become the Manifesto of English Romanticism.
He was made poet laureate.
POLITICS
His contact with revolutionary France had filled him with enthusiasm for the democratic ideals. The brutal, destructive developments of the Revolution brought him to the edge of a nervous breakdown.
FIRST GENERATION OF
ROMANTIC POETS,
characterised by the attempt to theorise about poetry.
MAN and NATURE
Wordsworth shared Rousseau's faith in the goodness of nature as well as in the excellence of the child. He thought that man could achieve that good through the cultivation of his senses and feelings.
Wordsworth believed that
man and nature are inseparable
= man exists not outside the natural world but as an active participant in it.
PANTHEISTIC VIEW = Wordsworth saw nature as something that includes both inanimate and human nature: each is a part of the same whole.
Nature is a source of pleasure and joy
, it comforts man in sorrow and teaches him how to love and to act in a moral way. Wordsworth also saw it as the
seat of the mighty spirit of the universe