WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)
Images:
--The Wye Valley today
-- "Interior of Tintern Abbey" (1794) by J. M. W. Turner

"TINTERN ABBEY"[258/235]
Form: [Blank verse; no stanzas; 5 movements
Problem: What spiritual solace can be found in post-Enlightenment modernity?
Movement 1:
Rural, pastoral idyll: Description of Wye Valley five years after first visit (1793/8).
Movement 2:
--The "beauteous forms" and the speaker
--"SPOT OF TIME"(time suspended)
Movement 3:
A faltering? A doubt
Movement 4:
--The three stages of life
1793--passionate young man (23 years)
1784?--wild young boy (say 14 yrs?)
1798--sober, subdued 28 year old
--Sublime experience
Movement 5:
--Speech to Dorothy and therefore to us
--The mind as mansion
Conclusion:
Simply, the mind becomes a reservoire for stored memories that serve as a spiritual resource in times of trial. More profoundly, humanity's response to natural beauty, mediated through memory, makes the mind a repository of associations. These encourage imaginative expansiveness so that the human consciousness is aware not only of things greater than it, but of its own capacity to be so aware. The effect of "these beauteous forms" is thus morally improving.

[Remind yourselves of the six characteristics of Romanticism: they are on Study Sheet 1 if you need a refresher.

PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS
1. What exactly is poetry? [265/242, 273/250]
2. What should poetry be about?[264/241-2)
3. What good does it do us? [266/243]
4. What sort of language is best for poetry, and why is it best? [265/241] Neo-classical, for example?

 "The Rape of the Lock"--Alexander Pope, (1712)
Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel
A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle?
Oh, say what stranger cause, yet unexplored,
Could make a gentle belle reject a lord?
or
"The Seasons" by James Thomson (1726)
The keener tempests come: and, fuming dun
From all the livid east or piercing north,
Thick clouds ascend, in whose capacious womb
A vapory deluge lies, to snow congealed.

No! "simple and unelaborated expression"

5. What is a poet, and to whom does he write or speak? [269/246]