9/26/02 Intro to Romanticism; Wordsworth, "Lines...Tintern Abbey"

Next week: we are exactly on schedule. Read the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads especially carefully. If you haven't read the headnote in the Norton on Romanticism, by all means do so.

"Tintern Abbey":

What I want to do today: deduce as much as possible about Romantic poetry from this single poem. For the most part, we'll operate under the very unsafe assumption that what we see in this one poem is representative of Romantic poetry in general (if we find something that doesn't seem to be to be very representative, I'll say as much).

lines 1-22 - what do you see?

• any satire? mock forms? what's the tone?
• any classical allusions? use of classical forms?
• --> what would expect about Wordsworth's attitudes towards "following the rules of the ancients"?
• what's the prosody? Caution: not necessarily representative--Wordsworth wrote a lot of blank verse, but he wrote other forms as well, and no other Romantic poet is as closely identified with it. But at the very least the dominance of the heroic couplet, or the tetrameter couplet in Swift's case, is over.
• how is the language different?
  • is there are anything here that has the kind of carefully crafted feel of a Pope couplet? How would we expect Wordsworth to feel about "craft"?
  • is there any use of periphrasis (roundabout, elevated or even over-elevated way of saying something), such as "shining altars of Japan" for coffee tables or "grateful liquors" for tea and coffee?

lines 23-49

• we said that neoclassical writers see poetry as playing a largely public role rather than a personal one. Is that the case here?
• because they see poetry as playing a largely public role, are concerned with the typical and universal over the exceptional or the invidual; is that the case here?
• -->concern with the mind of the poet
  • internal rather than external
  • personal rather than public
• Does Wordsworth seem to have the same conception of nature that Pope did?
• what does nature do?
  • 26-30: solace, restoration
  • 30-35: pleasure-->kindness
  • 35-49: mood of--what? communion with nature, God; sense of transcendance?
    • skip ahead to 93-102: awareness of God as living spirit infusing nature
    • --> reading the book of nature
  • COMPARED WITH NEOCLASSICAL: would Pope or Swift be inclined to trust someone who claimed to have a personal, direct contact with the divine?
  • IMMANENCE as opposed to HEIRARCHY

lines 58 - 85

• What states of his life does he refer to here? "animal" boyhood, rapturous adolescence or youth, present. To this we can add the intervening years referred to in 23 -49. What's the difference between all these stages?
  • direct contact/innocence: [COMPARE WITH NEO: interest in the childhood, madmen, peasants, alternate states and lower classes; would Pope or Swift have approved of "dizzy raptures"?]

lines 85-93, 92-102

• the present described fully. What is the "abundant recompense" for the loss of his earlier pleasures?

lines 102-111

• what part does perception play?
  • "half create, and half perceive"; Is it there or not? if half and half, what would that suggest about, say, Wordsworth's idea of mind and world or humans and nature?

lines 121-end:

• 121-133 is this a summary of the poem's representation of nature, or is something new added?
• what role does his sister play here?
  • 115 in thy voice I catch/ the language of my former heart
  • 134 ff. The prayer: wishes his sister to experience what he has, looking back? What's in that for him? Does he need her to reflect him in some way?