Wordsworth and Romantic Poetry: "…Tintern Abbey" and the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads

  1. Introduction: High Romanticism
    1. Towards the Interior
    2. Self and Self-consciousness
    3. Above Politics?
    4. The Hero in the Mind
  1. Wordsworth (1770-1850) and English Romantic Poetry
    1. Wordsworth’s Childhood and Education
    2. Radical Wordsworth
    3. Domestic Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads
  1. Reflection in Action: Wordsworth’s "Tintern Abbey"
    1. "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey: On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798"
    2. Naïve and Sentimental Poetry

Though absent long,

These forms of beauty have not been to me,

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,

And passing even into my purer mind

With tranquil restoration.

  1. Emotion Recollected in Tranquility

    2. "I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the traquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind."

    Therefore I am still

    A lover of the meadows and the woods,

    And mountains; and of all that we behold

    From this green earth; of all the mighty world

    Of eye and ear, both what they half create,

    And what perceive; well pleased to recognize

    In nature and the language of the sense,

    The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

    The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

    Of all my moral being.

  2. The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: Romantic Poetics
    1. The Purpose of Poetry
    2. Poetry and Prose
    3. Defining the Poet