William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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William WordsworthandSamuel Taylor Coleridge

• Let the Romantic Period Begin.

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Lyrical Ballads

• Published in 1798
• Tintern Abbey
• Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Began the Romantic Period

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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

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William Wordsworth

• Disillusioned about potential for change
• Reunited with sister, Dorothy
• 1795, inherited money
• 1797, met Coleridge
• 1798, Lyrical Ballads

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The Best Poet of the Age

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

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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?
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• -- 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?
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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

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The World is Too Much With Us

• 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

Tone?
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The World is Too Much With Us
How did the pagans differ from todays men?

• c It moves us not. Great God! Id 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.

Would we be happier if we were more in tune? Is
this still pertinent today?
Tone?
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Literary Form

• Sonnet
• Italian, Petrarchan octave and sestet
• Shakespearean 3 quatrains, couplet
• Ode
• uses heightened, impassioned language
• addresses an object

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• left university with no degree commitment to
  utopian colony in America
• depressed addiction to opium, failed marriage
• Sage of Highgate
• profound philosopher and guiding spirit

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• Called Wordsworth the the best poet of the age
• Wordsworth called Coleridge the most wonderful
  man Ive ever known
• Loneliness came from lifelong need for affection
  and support not available in an isolated writers
  life

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Love of Language

• Kubla Khan p. 846

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Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Exploration of the unreal/imagination
• Ballad in seven sections
• Love
• Shame
• Isolation
• Page 820

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Albatross