Contains seminar notes on the following poems from Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads:
Lines Written in Early Spring
Nature Never Did Betray The Heart That Loved Her
Salisbury Plain
Tintern Abbey
This document is around 2 pages long and also contains points regarding the poem's conte...
You can see how Ossian links to lyrical ballads, particularly in terms with ‘The
Thorn’ in terms of the atmosphere that is created
Wordsworth wrote a gothic play?? Something about the Scottish boarders. It’s
a kind of tragedy
World upside down
Lyrical Ballads fits very clearly into the cultural politics of the 1790s
Many people believed that these poems were political protests – e.g. Harry
Blake and Goody Hill
The idea that air or gases of various kind might have a beneficial effect may
have provided material for the more figurative treatment of air in poems like
‘Tintern Abbey’
Professor Roe: Wordsworth and Coleridge the radical years (the chapter
entitled the jacobin poems)
John Bugg ‘Five long winters’ provides some interesting context. He explores
the poetics of silence in mid-late 1790s
Lines written in early spring
Elegiac tone
Melancholic strain to the poem
Mary Wollstonecraft has a very similar phrase in ‘Vindications of the rights of
man’ and we know that WW and Dorothy were very interested in
Wollstonecraft
The words ‘thoughts’ and ‘think’ come up many times in the poem
Quantification of thought – ‘their thoughts I cannot measure’
Burden of thought
‘what man has made of man’ – overbearing thought
Precursor to transcendentalism; the Romantic writers were a very influential
group on the transcendentalists
‘Nature never did betray the heart that loved her’; matrix of betrayal
Wordsworthian sentiment that nature is a benign constant
By introducing the notion of betrayal there is naturally the implication that
nature betrayed her who didn’t love her – introducing the malevolent side of
nature that Wordsworth does write about
This line also elevates nature to a spiritual presence by introducing the
concept of reward for devotion
Animal vitality and Experiment
- In ‘Tintern Abbey’ WW seems to be using ‘something’ very comfortably as if
electricity infuses us???? Pantheistic, unitarian presence
- All links into the idea of experiment
- So the idea of scientific experience is linked into the volume as much as
literary experiment
- Poetic laboritary to see what the effect of poetry is on its readers
- The poems by WW and Coleridge are designed to create a micro-revolution in
thought and feeling. They do not readily produce a set of meanings but they
ascertain what the effect of reading poetry might be upon the reader
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