luka

Well-known member
An old thread which has been here for years with lots of interesting discussion of one of England's leading romantic poets.
 

sus

Well-known member
shiels's point about the subtler gothic that pervades Wordsworth's poems—not as explicit as in Coleridge, but there nonetheless—is interesting

And Linebaugh's absolutely correct, I think, pointing out how important a blueprint these guys are for later bohemian movements in the 19th and 20th Cs. John Worthen's The Gang captures how eccentric the Wordsworth siblings were seen as by their peers, even/especially Sarah Cridge—their habit of walking 20 miles round trip in a day to visit friends, or collect post in town, and then dash behind a stone wall to eagerly read them. Liberty in the sense of unrestrained expression—the pastoral ideal vs. "Civilization and its Discontents"s repression
 

sus

Well-known member
Background on Sarah vs. the Wordsworths—the standoff that would eventually end the Coleridge's marriage
1607282125651.png1607282162290.png
 

luka

Well-known member
As I said towards the beginning of the thread Wordsworth is not a poet I take naturally to and I've always been confused and intrigued by Prynne's love for him. Prynne says if you want to understand who and what we are, read The Prelude. High praise. I didn't, however, read The Prelude.
 

luka

Well-known member
Which of his do you like best? There's an extraordinary study Prynne did of the Solitary Reaper.
 

sus

Well-known member
I like watching lectures by english professors on romanticism though, origins of modern vegetarianism and anarchy, an explosion of feeling, the renewal of pastoralism with a political emphasis on liberty

good stuff
 

luka

Well-known member
You read Blake and you go, woah, trippy, what's he on about you read Wordsworth and he's going, that's a nice shrub over there
 

sus

Well-known member
I also like that Mark Fisher line—"Romanticism is the dressing-up of Teenage Ontology as an aesthetic cosmology. Teenage Ontology is governed by the conviction that what really matters is interiority: how you feel inside, and what your experiences and opinions are."

Based
 

sus

Well-known member
fr one of those lectures
This was the first great age of biography, autobiography, and autobiographical literary creation—this was the age when writers began writing above all about themselves.
 

luka

Well-known member
Whats the most interesting Blake, ya reckon?

Not sure really. They all interlink and inform each other. I like The Marriage of Heaven and Hell a lot because it was my entry point. Urizen is a nice bite sized manageable prophetic book. They all merit much more time and attention than I've given them though. Jerusalem is extraordinary.
 
  • Like
Reactions: sus

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
IT was a close, warm, breezeless summer night,
Wan, dull, and glaring, with a dripping fog
Low-hung and thick that covered all the sky;
But, undiscouraged, we began to climb
The mountain-side. The mist soon girt us round, 5
And, after ordinary travellers’ talk
With our conductor, pensively we sank
Each into commerce with his private thoughts:
Thus did we breast the ascent, and by myself
Was nothing either seen or heard that checked 10
Those musings or diverted, save that once
The shepherd’s lurcher, who, among the crags
Had to his joy unearthed a hedgehog, teased
His coiled-up prey with barkings turbulent.
This small adventure, for even such it seemed 15
In that wild place and at the dead of night,
Being over and forgotten, on we wound
In silence as before. With forehead bent
Earthward, as if in opposition set
Against an enemy, I panted up 20
With eager pace, and no less eager thoughts.
Thus might we wear a midnight hour away,
Ascending at loose distance each from each,
And I, as chanced, the foremost of the band;
When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten, 25
And with a step or two seemed brighter still;
Nor was time given to ask or learn the cause,
For instantly a light upon the turf
Fell like a flash, and lo! as I looked up,
The Moon hung naked in a firmament 30
Of azure without cloud, and at my feet
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean; and beyond,
Far, far beyond, the solid vapours stretched, 35
In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes,
Into the main Atlantic, that appeared
To dwindle, and give up his majesty,
Usurped upon far as the sight could reach.
Not so the ethereal vault; encroachment none 40
Was there, nor loss; only the inferior stars
Had disappeared, or shed a fainter light
In the clear presence of the full-orbed Moon,
Who, from her sovereign elevation, gazed
Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay 45
All meek and silent, save that through a rift—
Not distant from the shore whereon we stood
A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing-place—
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice! 50
Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour,
For so it seemed, felt by the starry heavens.
When into air had partially dissolved
That vision, given to spirits of the night
And three chance human wanderers, in calm thought 55
Reflected, it appeared to me the type
Of a majestic intellect, its acts
And its possessions, what it has and craves,
What in itself it is, and would become.
There I beheld the emblem of a mind 60
That feeds upon infinity, that broods
Over the dark abyss, intent to hear
Its voices issuing forth to silent light
In one continuous stream; a mind sustained
By recognitions of transcendent power, 65
In sense conducting to ideal form,
In soul of more than mortal privilege.
One function, above all, of such a mind
Had Nature shadowed there, by putting forth,
’Mid circumstances awful and sublime, 70
That mutual domination which she loves
To exert upon the face of outward things,
So moulded, joined, abstracted, so endowed
With interchangeable supremacy,
That men, least sensitive, see, hear, perceive, 75
And cannot choose but feel. The power, which all
Acknowledge when thus moved, which Nature thus
To bodily sense exhibits, is the express
Resemblance of that glorious faculty
That higher minds bear with them as their own. 80
This is the very spirit in which they deal
With the whole compass of the universe:
They from their native selves can send abroad
Kindred mutations; for themselves create
A like existence; and, whene’er it dawns 85
Created for them, catch it, or are caught
By its inevitable mastery,
Like angels stopped upon the wing by sound
Of harmony from Heaven’s remotest spheres.
Them the enduring and the transient both 90
Serve to exalt; they build up greatest things
From least suggestions; ever on the watch,
Willing to work and to be wrought upon,
They need not extraordinary calls
To rouse them; in a world of life they live, 95
By sensible impressions not enthralled,
But by their quickening impulse made more prompt
To hold fit converse with the spiritual world,
And with the generations of mankind
Spread over time, past, present, and to come, 100
Age after age, till Time shall be no more.
 

luka

Well-known member
Fair enough that is pretty good. I will get round to reading The Prelude one day, I will, I will. I've got it here somewhere.
 

luka

Well-known member
"That said, you say that poetry for you has never had much or anything to do with politics. For me the opposite is true. Wordsworth for me would be a great, even a classic example of a supremely political poet, provided that we extend the concept of the political to include social relations, as I just provisionally did. At the first moment when Wordsworth seriously ventured into writing verse and prose polemic, he was a committed and ardent republican, determined that every word he wrote in poetry, however apparently innocuous or fictional, should be shaped to the end of transforming social relations in the light cast by the great cataclysm of the French revolution. I’ve written about how even moments in Wordsworth’s poetry which, on the face of it, seem to bear absolutely no relation whatsoever to any social question, can in fact quite readily be interpreted as, not even allegories, but direct social commands, that people should be made to confront their most stubborn forms of intellectual and emotional prejudice, which have immediate social repercussions."
 

jenks

thread death
I like a lot of his stuff in the Lyrical Ballads, much of The Prelude but one of my favourites is Intimations of Immortality which may well appear to Dissensus types.
 
Top