Like Wordsworth’s speaker who ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’, this figure dwelt in solitude and his aloofness allowed his creative tendencies to produce poetry of the most romantic kind. Wordsworth’s romantic poet-speaker was a self-indulgent observer. Wordsworth was that one Romantic poet who epitomised the concept of individuality more than any other poet of his age. As the ideals of liberty and human rights were the topics of hot debate and discussion during the French Revolution, Wordsworth declared in The Prelude (1799-1805) that,īut to be young was very heaven! Wordsworth The revolutionary zeal that was characteristic of most writers of this movement did not leave Wordsworth unaffected. In this regard, Wordsworth noted that a poet was bound by ‘the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human’. Pleasure was central to the Romantic movement and Wordsworth, like a true romantic, believed that the primary aim of poetry was to please the reader. This is similar to the idea of another Romantic poet, John Keats, who wrote that “If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.” Unlike the Neoclassical poets who had been obsessively concerned about the rules and diction of poetry, Wordsworth favoured poetry that flowed naturally. Wordsworth’s poetic theory is also significant in the fact that it believed that poetry flowed spontaneously from the poet. Unlike the preceding age of Neoclassical poets whose poetry sought to communicate with the intellect, Wordsworth’s poetry was intended to communicate to the human emotions. This focus on emotional or the affective aspects became central to Romanticism. His definition of poetry stressed on the idea that poetry was born out of human emotions. This was very close to the kind of language real men used to converse with each other.īy declaring that poetry is ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, Wordsworth became the first significant voice of literary romanticism in England. Unlike the earlier poets for whom form had remained the primary concern, Wordsworth chose to write in the common language. Instead, he chose to write in what he called ‘ the real language of men’. He had abandoned the conventional rule-governed poetic style that was considered best-suited for poetry. Wordsworth had attempted an experiment in the Lyrical Ballads. This romantic obsession with the faculty of imagination was also reiterated by the fellow Romantic poet ST Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria published in 1817. Rather, he emphasized that such common subjects should be treated in poetry with a ‘ colouring of imagination’. What is important to understand is that by saying that poetry should deal with ordinary subjects, Wordsworth did not intend to make poetry dull. ![]() The subject of poetry, for Wordsworth, had to be something common, familiar, ordinary, mundane and rustic. ![]() According to Wordsworth, poetry that dealt with the higher subjects was superficial and lacked depth. This seemed like a radical view to the readers who had been accustomed to reading poetry about larger than life heroes or other such archaic subjects. Wordsworth believed that the subject of poetry should be the ‘ humble and rustic life’. To make his poetry better understood, Wordsworth added a preface in order to explain his choice of language and subjects. Since the poems contained in Lyrical Ballads were not in accordance with the conventions of poetry, they were received with skepticism initially. These poems departed in style and subject from the poetry of the Neoclassical poets. The majority of this work comprised Wordsworth’s poems. Wordsworth’s collaborative work with his friend and fellow-poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge proved to be a landmark in the history of English Literature. With this landmark publication, the turn of the century witnessed a radical change in the way poetry was read and perceived. The Preface that he added to the subsequent 1800 edition of this work became the manifesto of a new era called the Romantic Age. He inaugurated the Romantic movement in English Literature with the publication of his Lyrical Ballads in 1798. ![]() The poet William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the famous Lake District in England.
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