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Romantic Poets Notes (ENGL 210)
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Romantic Poets Notes (ENGL 210)
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Topic 12: Romantic PoetsJanuary 9th, 2023
Contextualizing Wordsworth
Wordsworth and Coleridge (the Lake Poets) were some of the most propagandistic poets with
regard to what poetry could do (in their collection, The Lyrical Ballads)
● Wordsworth became the official court poet – he outlived the Romantic period and lived
into the Victorian period.
Tintern Abbey – a set of instructions to his sister Dorothy, how she can derive sustenance from
nature (and how she should think about arranging her mind)
● The landscape of the poem is an intellectual abbey.
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
A retrospective poem which “looks back” in history to early childhood.
● Transience and intensity of experience in the Romantic era (there’s a lot of interest in
transient states of being throughout Romantic poems)
● There’s something particularly intense and beautiful about the experience that is with you
and doesn’t last (where this could be high like drugs in Coleridge and Keats, for
Wordsworth, he is reflecting on the larger scale of life)
○ “There was a time” (l. 1) meaning that this is not now, but about the past
(something that has gone) – he’s struggling throughout the poem with the
contours of nostalgia.
■ What does it mean to have contours for something beautiful? Why is it
also okay that it isn’t with you anymore?
● This poem is about loss, modes of vision, forms and frames of perception… It is actually
a densely philosophical and abstract poem in many ways.
○ Records a loss by describing maturation into adulthood – we often talk about
adulthood as a net gain (you gain autonomy, a sense of who you are, etc.)
■ Wordsworth tells us not to take these for granted (let’s scrutinize them!)
○ For Wordsworth, childhood presents a cosmic connection with the universe to
view things in a way that you cannot as an adult anymore.
Second stanza – there is a large emphasis on feeling. Wordsworth intellectualizes and
emphasizes feeling – he translates emotions into ideas and beautiful things that are relatable.
● For Wordsworth, the visionary perceptions of childhood are authenticated and made into
an ethically valuable entity with their mystical connection to nature.
○ “Glory” – this is a poem that is illuminated by metaphors of light (there’s a lot of
light imagery here) – does he ever answer the question, “where is it now, the
glory and the dream?”
○ What is the emotional register that Wordsworth is trying to evoke here? Is this a
poem about solace or mourning?
Reading as coming to terms with leaving the physical world behind (life and death)
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