Period during which the work was written…

• Characterized by freedom of the mind and an idealistic view of human nature, Romanticism slowly crept out of Neo-classicism to become one of the most influential periods of British literature. It is the emergence of this new literary period called Romanticism that stirred an interest in those who were hungry for a new form of writing and thought. This idea, although relatively short-lived and lasting only from 1798-1832, had enormous effects on the philosophy and literature of the time while leaving its mark on the history of England.

• When describing Romanticism, an author once said:

This was a turbulent period, during which England experienced the ordeal of change from a primarily agricultural society, where wealth and power had been concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a modern industrial nation, in which the balance of economic power shifted to large-scale employers, who found themselves ranged against an immensely enlarging and increasingly restive working class.

• Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated around the middle of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature.

• The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature. It elevated folk art, nature and custom, as well as arguing for an epistemology based on nature, which included human activity conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage.

• It was influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment and elevated medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be from the medieval period. The name "romantic" itself comes from the term "romance" which is a prose or poetic heroic narrative originating in medieval literature and romantic literature. The ideologies and events of the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution are thought to have influenced the movement.

• Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability in the representation of its ideas.

Poet’s standing in this period• As style was vital to Romanticism, William

Wordsworth is said to be one of the most important and influential poets of British literature. As a poet his style was very free and naturalistic which was characteristic of Romanticism. Along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth wrote Lyrical Ballads in 1800. In this work, “the two poets affirmed the importance of feeling and imagination to poetic creation and disclaimed conventional literary forms and subjects” (“Romanticism (literature)”). According to Rasnake, “Wordsworth’s disillusionment with the French Revolution” (Rasnake) was a key element in his chosen style and creative direction. The volumes of influential works authored by William Wordsworth brought about significant changes in the literary world.

• For example, different writing styles emerged with many having freer and more detailed, fast paced plots. Wordsworth combined an abundance of genres into one in order to make the plots so unique. A result of this was the tragicomedy, which was a collection of grotesque and sublime plots. He terminated the use of the three unities of time, place, and action, which were no longer tolerated in classical conventional tragedies.

• William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, an autobiographical poem of his early years that was revised and expanded a number of times. It was never published during his lifetime, and was only given the title after his death. Up until this time it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

• Wordsworth received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from Durham University, and the same honour from Oxford University the next year.In 1842 the government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300 a year. With the death in 1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became the Poet Laureate. When his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry came to a standstill.

• Major works• Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems

(1798) – "Simon Lee" – "We Are Seven" – "Lines Written in Early Spring" – "Expostulation and Reply" – "The Tables Turned" – "The Thorn" – "Lines Composed A Few Miles above

Tintern Abbey"

• Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800) – Preface to the Lyrical Ballads – "Strange fits of passion have I known"[4] – "She Dwelt among the Untrodden

Ways"[4] – "Three years she grew"[4] – "A slumber did my spirit seal"[4] – "I travelled among unknown men"[4] – "Lucy Gray" – "The Two April Mornings" – "Nutting" – "The Ruined Cottage" – "Michael"

• Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) – "Resolution and Independence" – "I wandered lonely as a cloud" – "My heart leaps up" – "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" – "Ode to Duty" – "The Solitary Reaper" – "Elegiac Stanzas" – "Composed upon Westminster Bridge,

September 3, 1802" – "London, 1802" – "The world is too much with us"

• The Excursion (1814) – "Prospectus to The Recluse"

• Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) – "Mutability"

• The Prelude (1850, posthumous) – The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's

Mind

Theme of the Poem…• Change and Transformation• As the poem’s subtitle and first line tell the

reader, Wordsworth wrote “Tintern Abbey” upon his return to the locale after a five-year absence. The place retains the endearing natural quality he remembers from his first visit, but now, as a more experienced observer, he notes there is a special harmony between man and nature that represents its own kind of beauty. This recognition is evident in the first stanza, in which the poet combines both man-made and natural images from the scene, often in the same line. Thus, we see the “sportive wood run wild” (nature) and “these pastoral farms” (man), “groves” (man) and “copses” (nature), and “wreathes of smoke” (man) “from among the trees” (nature).

• These juxtapositions are in contrast with the poet’s recollection of his first visit, when his attention was drawn not by man’s intercourse with the land but rather by nature purely: “Wherever nature led me.” Throughout much of the third stanza, we see the more youthful, “remembered” poet’s individual interaction with nature — with the hills, mountains, streams, rocks and woods. Devoid of reflection, the younger man came to nature as if compelled by an “appetite” or “passion”; the call was “coarser” and more “animal,” but it was also “haunted” by some nameless “dread.”

• The experience of that first visit was intense, characterized by “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures,” but inarticulable. To the returning adult, those feelings “are no more,” but they are replaced by a more “sober pleasure” — the pleasure of wisdom, the ability to make sense of and give form to the youthful passions that time has diminished. Through such wisdom, the hauntedness is eased: it has been named and understood, and allows a person to come to nature seeking “the thing he loves” rather than “flying from something he dreads.”

• It is clear the speaker has been through much in the intervening years. During the difficult span of time — “the length of five long winters” — he has experienced solitude both in “lonely rooms” and ’ “mid the din of towns and cities.” He has learned life cannot be one unbroken state of “dizzy raptures”; if it were, after all, such moments would not seem exceptional and would not be called raptures. Instead, he had become acquainted with the “dreary intercourse of daily life,” its “weariness” and “fever,” the loss and pain, the “heavy and weary weight of all this unintelligible world.” But at the same time he has discovered the crux of his own

Romantic sensibility. In the state of youth — in which “all [is] in all,” and a person is therefore un-separated from nature — articulation of experience is not required. One simply “lives.” In a less-innocent state, however, one understands that those “dizzy raptures,” the pinnacles of the youthful soul’s existence, are “food” for the adult soul. They are the moments the “spirit turn[s] to” for light and meaning. Once articulated by the mature mind, they reveal a deeper “power of joy” and allow one to “see into the life of things,” revealing a harmonious relationship between man’s spirit and the spirit of natural world.

• Nature and its meaning• Wordsworth explains that through

observing Nature, and not merely reveling in its sheer power and beauty as he did as a youth, he has come to appreciate it to an even greater extent, and that it cheers him when he is removed from it for long periods; this concept parallels the early Wordsworthian idea of Nature as a teacher and the deep appreciation and understanding one can gain through absorbing its teachings "in a wise passiveness"

• This concept is further established in "Tintern Abbey" in Wordsworth's exhortations to his sister, Dorothy, within the following passage:

"When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! hen, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me"

• With Wordsworth's beautiful image of one's mind becoming "a mansion for all lovely forms," he underscores his belief in the power of the human mind to perceive, comprehend, and attribute meaning to the beauty one finds in Nature, as well as its ability to find solace in this power. This concept is central to and defining of his belief in the power of creation through perception.

Title…• Tintern Abbey was a popular

picturesque location that Wordsworth had read about in a Gilpin Guide book. Turner painted the abbey in 1794 but the abbey itself doesn’t feature in Wordsworth’s poem, in which he is questioning the nature of visual perception, after returning to the abbey, not having seen it for 5 years.

Structure…• Wordsworth defined good poetry as “the

spontaneous overflow” of emotion, implying that a good poem must be free of constricting rules of rhyme, verse form, and so on. Although critics debate precisely how spontaneous the act of composition was for Wordsworth, it is clear that his poetry at least aspires to appear spontaneous. Wordsworth also asserted that poetry should consist of “language really used by men.” In keeping with this, the poet cast “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” in blank verse — that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter; the meter of blank verse imitates the rhythms of natural speech.

• The poem is divided into verse paragraphs — sets of lines that, like the sentences which compose a prose paragraph, are grouped together because they share a common subject. The repetition of the phrase “and the” has the effect of an incantation, a recitation of a phrase intended to produce an hypnotic effect. There are several instances of alliteration, and several instances of variations in rhythm.

Conclusion…• Wordsworth’s poems are the reflections of

a monotonous life, a life with dearth of excitement. He had an inherent feeling, that the very sense of being a human being is lost, where man has lost his imaginary power and has taken refuge under the veil of self invited ignorance. All men live in a world of deadness; nobody seems alive, or awakened.

• The poem’s beginning suggests, “Tintern Abbey” upon his return after a five-year long absence, retains the endearing natural quality he remembers from his first visit; but now, as a more experienced observer, he believes that the memory of the woods has affected him intensely, that he has referred to these experiences to stay away from the “fretful stir.”

• He has metaphorically referred to the nature as if it were alive. The experiences of that first visit were so intense, characterized by “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures,” that they have left an everlasting image in his mind, and food for his adult soul.

• It is clear that Wordsworth has been through much in the intervening years. “The length of five long winters” that he spent in urban settings were fretful and troublesome, the spirit of his joy of his past experience has soothed his troubled soul

and saved him from the “dreary intercourse of daily life,” its “weariness” and “fever,” the loss and pain, the “heavy and weary weight” of this entire unintelligible world.” Although at the same time he has discovered his way back to the present and is curious to discover what he has missed in the previous visit.

• Wordsworth then turns to his sister Dorothy who is now going through the same experiences that were experienced by himself in his previous visit; he recreates the entire scene in front of her and takes pleasure in reminiscence.

• He sees the same exuberant anxiousness in his sister’s eyes, and parlays that she will benefit from the love of nature as he had. He has complete faith that if they happen to separate in future, then ‘he’ in the form of nature will guide her through.