William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge Let the Romantic Period Begin….

William Wordsworthand

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Let the Romantic Period Begin….

Lyrical Ballads

Published in 1798

Tintern Abbey

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Began the Romantic Period

William Wordsworth

1770-1850

Orphaned in 1783

Degree from Cambridge, 1791

No head for business

1791, went to France to learn the language

Inspired by Revolution

William Wordsworth

Disillusioned about potential for change

Reunited with sister, Dorothy

1795, inherited money

1797, met Coleridge

1798, Lyrical Ballads

The Best Poet of the Age

Poetry: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” produced by someone who has “thought long and deeply” (Wordsworth).

“She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways”

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

This suggests?

This suggests?

-- Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be;But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me!

This is one of five “Lucy” poems. How did he feel about Lucy?

This suggests?

Did you see

this coming?

The World is Too Much With Us

1807

Sonnet: 14 lines, shift in thought

Wordsworth realized his creative powers were beginning to fail

Response to accusations of conspiring against society, being an enemy of society

a The world is too much with us; late and soon,

b Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

b Little we see in Nature that is ours;

a We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

a This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

b The winds that will be howling at all hours,

b And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers;

a For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

The World is Too Much With Us

Tone?

c It moves us not. –Great God! I’d rather be

d A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

c So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

d Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

c Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

d Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

The World is Too Much With Us

Tone?Would we be happier if we were more ‘in tune’?

Is this still pertinent today?

How did the pagans differ from today’s men?

Literary Form

Sonnet

Italian, Petrarchan: octave and sestet

Shakespearean: 3 quatrains, couplet

Ode

uses heightened, impassioned language

addresses an object

Samuel Taylor Coleridgeleft university with no degree – commitment to utopian colony in Americadepressed: addiction to opium, failed marriage“Sage of Highgate”profound philosopher and guiding spirit

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Called Wordsworth the “the best poet of the age”

Wordsworth called Coleridge “the most wonderful man I’ve ever known”

Loneliness came from lifelong need for affection and support not available in an isolated writer’s life

Love of Language

Kubla Khan p. 846

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Exploration of the ‘unreal’/imagination

‘Ballad’ in seven sections

Love

Shame

Isolation

Page 820

Albatross