SQUEEZE YOUR BRAINS!! List the periods/ages in English Literature. Medieval literature (1066-1510) Geoffrey Chaucer Renaissance and Reformation (1510-1620) Univ Wits, Shakes., Revolution and Restoration (1620-1690) Metaphysical poets Neo-classicism (1690-1780) Defoe, Addison, Steele, etc Romantic period (1780-1830) Shelley, Keats, Byron, etc Late Victorian & Edwardian lit., (1830-1880) Dickens, Carlyle., Modernism (1920-1945) Woolf, Richardson, Lawrence, etc… Post-war & Post-modernism (1950’s – present)

What do you know about William Wordsworth? (Slide 5)

How does Romanticism emerge? (Slide 3,4)

Neo-Classicism insisted:

“Poetry imitated nature to delight and to

instruct and the poet must follow the rules

of the ancients”

Dryden, Addison & Dr.Johnson– questioned all the rules did not stand for the ‘Test of Time’

“Changes are always developments, they are never complete severances”

ROMANTICISM – the name to the new change

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

• Born: 7 April, 1770• Died: 23 April, 1850• A Major English Romantic Poet• With S. T. Coleridge, launched

“ROMANTIC AGE”• ‘Magnum Opus’ The Prelude(A Semiautobiographical poem)• Britain’s Poet Laureate :

From 1843 until his death in1850

William Wordsworth

Manifesto of English Romantic

Criticism

WORDSWORTH AS A CRITIC

Not by temperament & training

‘The Lyrical Ballads’ – 1798

The preface (2nd edition) – 1800

An Appendix – 1802

An Essay Supplementary – 1815

Literary criticism – demolishes old & faulty

“…more permanent and a far morephilosophical language”

Difference: not only in metre, but also inthe choice of words and phrases

Disgusted by the “gaudiness and inane phraseology” of many modern writers, he castigates poets who,

“ separate themselves from the sympathies of men,… to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation”

Simple in language:

“ language of common men…”

• Poetry is to give pleasure…

Situations from everyday life:– “The principal object: to choose incidents and situations from

common life,…”

Selection of language:– “In a selection of language really used by men…”

Transformed by the poet’s imagination:

Ordinary events VIVID & ATTRACTIVE– “to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination…”

“ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect”

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* ‘man speaking to men’

* ‘a man,… endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul’

*‘every great poet is a teacher; I wish either to be considered as a teacher or as nothing…’

[Plato and Wordsworth has much in common]

* The idea of poetry form of communication

Rene Wellek

“Wordsworth….in the history of criticism which must

be called ambiguous or transitional,…. he adopts a

theory of poetry, in which imagination holds the

central place”

“…Wordsworth left only a small body of criticism, it is

rich in survivals, suggestions, anticipations and

personal insights…”

“Wordsworth actually ends in good neo-classicism,

doth the same tale repeat,… in a selection of

language really used by men…”

says….