Essay
Wordsworth on Romantic Imagination
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Sheds light on the condition of England during Wordsworth's time, his conceptions of poetry, poetic faculty, and imagination along with his pantheism and deism.
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William WordsworthWordsworth assumes a prophetic persona to instil hope in the masses
in the post-revolutionary milieu in Europe. The aftermath of the
revolution brought cultural anxiety and unrest in Europe. The
Industrial Revolution brought mechanisation that pervaded all aspects
of life. Wordsworth brings a re-enchantment of the world through his
imagination and finds scientific explanations of the world reductive and
the source of disillusionment and disenchantment. For him, a poet is a
sensitive man who with his aesthetic delight finds a sense of harmony
and wholeness in nature. He is involved in creating a quasi-mythical
state to see into the life of things to reveal elemental truth. He
projects his intensity into the world and the phenomenal world
becomes a mouthpiece or a surrogate for his philosophy which is called
his egotistical sublime. Wordsworth also believes in the suspension of
senses for artistic activity. For him, ‘poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful emotions, recollected in tranquillity. After
getting sensorily active, the poet should be calm and serene and
someone with a pure heart. When perceptions are recollected in
tranquillity, there is a rebirth. Since the actual senses are suspended,
there is a deeper insight, not sight. Even though Wordsworth’s
imagination is associative, Coleridge doesn’t call him a fanciful poet but
calls it a poorly theorised imagination.
Due to the industrial revolution, there was an alienation of man from
nature. Wordsworth overcomes the alienation and asserts himself by
using poetry to mediate between himself and nature employing
imagination. He seeks to remove the veil of habituation and thus
defamiliarize the familiar. The familiar is made to seem different but
with a colouring of imagination. He has a pantheistic conception of
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