Wordsworth’s Preface

Paper III: Literary Theory & Criticism Student’s Name: Kaushal DesaiClass: M.A. Sem-1Roll No. : 17Year: 2013/14Submitted To: Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji

Bhavnagar University

William Wordsworth

“I was the Dreamer, they the Dream; I roamed Delighted with the motley spectacle:

Gowns grave, or gaudy, doctors, students, streets, Courts, cloisters, flocks of churches, gateways, towers: Migration strange for a stripling of the

hills, A northern villager.”

The Priest of Nature

Wordsworth on Nature

• Nature is the NURSE of the imagination

• Threefold understanding of nature:→ External nature: scenery → All of existence → A presence/divine life that informs the whole and every part. A quasi-divine ministering presence.

Wordsworth “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”

“Spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…emotion recollected in tranquility”

Wordsworth & Coleridge

○ In 1798, two young English poets William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) published a book of poems called Lyrical Ballads.○ In 1800 an expanded edition was published, with a preface-a kind of poetic manifesto-by wordsworth. This is generally regarded as the official beginning of Romanticism in England.

Preface to Lyrical Ballads Main Ideas

• Poems are different• Manner in which we associate ideas in a state of

excitement• Low and rustic life• Poems have a purpose• Feelings more important than action• Poetry – the image of man and nature• Poetry gives pleasure• Poetry is universal

Subject of poetry

Poetry was to deal with The best

subjects to write about were

LanguageThe poems were to be

written as far as Possible and as near as possible

to though purified

Role of the Imagination

Imagination was to play a very important

role, which Wordsworth identified

with its capacity

Poetry as memory

the poet describes natural and simple

objects and peaceful landscapes

Task of the Poet

equal to other men in quality, the Poet

stands apart from them because of He is

in fact possessed

The Nature of Poetry

♦ Poetry is all-encompassing. It binds together human society, and it spans all

knowledge, and all time periods. Poetry is not just literature written in verse.

Poem’s Main Subject

♦ the nature of the imagination, and imagination’s relationship to nature.

The poem is about the mind’s dialogue with nature.

What Is a Poet?

• A poet:→ “is a man speaking to men”→ Knows a lot—“greater knowledge of human nature”→ Is tuned in to emotions—his own and others’: “a lively sensibility”→ Has a good memory and can imagine distant things as if they are present→ And has “greater promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement”

• Daffodils

Foremost Poems

• Rainbow

• “The Tables Turned”

• “The World Is Too Much”

• “Lines Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey "

Us"

www.slideshare.net/kaushal111

Thank you…