Ministry of higher education, science and innovations termiz state pedagogical institute the faculty of foreign language and literature

CHAPTER II. The role of William Wordsworth in the literature of romanticism
2.1 Characteristics of William Wordsworth's works
Main Features of William Wordsworth’s Poetry:
1. Emphasis on Nature
2. Use of simple and everyday human language
3. Wrote against corrupt society practises
4. Love for nature
Nature: Wordsworth often wrote about nature and his love for the outdoors. He believed that nature was a source of inspiration and renewal, and he used it as a way to explore and express his emotions.
Imagination: Wordsworth’s poetry was often rooted in the power of the imagination. He believed that the imagination was a powerful tool for understanding the world and connecting with others.
Simplicity: Wordsworth’s poetry was characterized by its simple language and straightforward style. He often wrote in a conversational tone and used everyday language to convey his ideas.
Emotion: Wordsworth’s poetry was often rooted in emotion. He often wrote about his own emotions and experiences, as well as those of others. He believed that emotions were a powerful way to connect with others.
Memory: Wordsworth often wrote about memory and how it shaped his life and his poetry. He believed that memories could be a powerful source of inspiration and reflection.
Some of the main features of Wordsworth's poetry are a spiritual veneration for nature, a dislike for modernity, an interest in the individual and the imagination, a fascination with childhood, and the employment of common language.
William Wordsworth is one of the Romantic poets, and as such, his work exhibits many of the characteristics of Romantic poetry, including a disdain for the ugliness of modernity, a spiritual reverence for nature, an appreciation for childhood, a focus on the individual and the human mind, and the use of simple, everyday language. Let's look at some examples to illustrate these characteristics.
In “Lines Written in Early Spring,” the speaker sits in a grove and listens to the “thousand blended notes” of the natural world around him, receiving a “thrill of pleasure” from the hopping birds, the “budding twigs,” and the “primrose tufts.” He uses spiritual language to capture his experience; he says that it is “my faith” that each flower “Enjoys the air it breathes,” and he speaks of “Nature's holy plan” and the link between nature and his human soul. Indeed, the natural world provides the speaker with an almost religious experience.
In “The World Is Too Much with Us,” Wordsworth laments the “Getting and spending” of the modern world as well as people's ignorance of the natural world. Modern people are so focused on commerce that they have given their hearts to it and no longer feel beauty. Rather, they waste their powers on the world that is “too much with us.”
“The Solitary Reaper” illustrates Wordsworth's strong focus on the individual and the human mind. The poem centers around a young woman in a field who is “Reaping and singing by herself.” She is not aware of the speaker's observation but rather goes about her work, allowing the music of her mind and soul to flow freely, and that music flows in to the mind and soul of the speaker. He carries it away with him as he walks on, appreciating the meeting of hearts that has just happened between himself and this unknown woman.
“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” expounds on the innocence and wonders of childhood, when a person's soul is naturally close to nature. What he once experienced in himself, the speaker now sees in his sister as she walks in the arms of nature with “shooting lights” in her eyes, a “cheerful faith,” and a simple joy that has not yet experienced the cruelty of humans. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” suggests similar ideas, namely that the child's soul remembers its origins and therefore sees them more easily in the world.
In all of these poems, and many others, Wordsworth uses simple, everyday language. He wants to capture the ideas of the common person, and to do that, he must incorporate their speech along with his depth of imagery, symbolism, and emotion. “My Heart Leaps Up” provides a prime example. The poem is both deep in meaning and simple and accessible in language.
Wordsworth’s masterpiece, however was his large autobiographical poem entitled The Prelude (1850), which focused on the formative experience of his youth. His first two collections of poetry were published in 1793, five years after his first published poem. They respectively entitled An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. Both were strongly influenced by the writing style of the Eighteenth century. Not long after this in 1795, Wordsworth would make a fateful meeting, that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In spite of, or perhaps, even because of their at times stormy relationship, they manage to collaborate and produce the founding document of the English Romantic movement, published in 1798; The Lyrical Ballads.
In 1807, the third edition of what was to become a classical work was supplemented with a long- awaited introduction written by Wordsworth. Having defined what poetry is according to Wordsworth, he defines it as:
“ He is a man speaking to men; a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the going-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”
Eventually, Coleridge and Wordsworth lived close to each other in the North of England in the lake district, which in fact would end up earning them together with Robert Southey, the label of “Lake poets.” Wordsworth was clearly part of larger circles of contemporary literary figures in England as well. Wordsworth is celebrated for, amongst others, his Lucy poems, which are a series of five poems written between 1798-1801.earlier versions of four of them, however, had already been published in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800. He was to attempt to write in as pure as possible English and thus try and touch as much as communicate through prose the high morals of love, beauty, nature, death and longing amongst other ideals. In 1807, Wordsworth published poems in two volumes which includes poems entitled “Resolution and Independence”, “I wandered as a lonely cloud” (known as Daffodils), “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” and “The World is too much with us.”
“The rainbow come and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare.”
Similarly, in the poem Tintern Abbey, the poet sees the river, the stream, steep and lofty cliffs through his imaginative eyes. He was enthusiastically charmed at the joyful sound of the rolling river. Here he says,

“Once again

Do I behold those steep and lofty cliffs
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion and
Connect
The landscape with quiet of the sky.”
In this poem, the poet seems that the nature has a healing power. Even the recollection of nature soothes the poet’s troubled heart. The poet can feel the existence of nature through imagination even when he is away from her, he says,
“In lovely rooms and ‘mid the dim
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensation sweet.”
2) Nature- He is especially regarded as a poet of nature. In most of the poems of William Wordsworth, nature is constructed as both a healing entity and a teacher or moral guardian. Nature is considered in his poems as a living personality. He is a true worshiper of nature: nature’s devotee or high priest. The critic Cazamian says:
“To William Wordsworth, nature appears as a formative influence superior to any other, the educator of senses or mind alike, the shower in our hearts of the deep laden seeds of our feelings and beliefs.”
He dwells with great satisfaction on the prospects of spending his time in groves and valleys and on the banks of streams that will lull him to rest with their soft murmur. For Wordsworth, nature is a healer and he ascribes healing properties to nature in Tintern Abbey. This is a fairly obvious conclusion drawn from his reference to “Tranquil Restoration”, that his memory of the Wye offered him “in lovely rooms and mid the in/ of towns and cities.”
3) Subjectivity- it is the key note of Romantic poetry. He expresses his personal thoughts, feelings through his poems. In Ode: Intimation of Immortality, the poet expresses his own/ personal feelings. Here he says, that he can’t see the celestial light anymore which he used to see in his childhood. He says,
“It is not how as it hath been of yore
Turn wheresoever I may,
By might or day,
The things which I have seen I now can
Seen on more.”
4) Pantheism and Mysticism- These two are almost interrelated factors in the nature poetry of the Romantic period. Wordsworth conceives of a spiritual power running through all natural objects- the “presence that disturbs me with the law of elevated thoughts” whose dwelling is the light.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 and was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who with his friend Wordsworth was a founder of the romantic movement in England and a member of the Lake poets. He died on 25 July 1834. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria.

His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English- speaking culture. He coined many familiar words and phrases, including suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence of Emerson and American transcendentalism. Throughout his adult life, Coleridge suffered from crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he suffered from bipolar disorder, a condition not identified from poor physical health that may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illness. He was treated for these concerns with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction. His opium addiction now began to takeover his life: he separated with his wife Sarah in 1808, quarreled with Wordsworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, and put himself under the care of Doctor Daniel in 1814. His addiction caused severe constipation, which required regular and humiliating enemas. He is one of the most important figures in English poetry. His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is particulary important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very idea of “Conversational Poems”. ³
The idea of utilizing common language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely in Coleridge’s mind. It is difficult to imagine Wordsworth’s great poems, The Excursion or The Prelude, ever having been written without the direct influence of Coleridge’s originality. As important as Coleridge was to poetry as a poet, he was equally important to poetry as a critic. His philosophy of poetry, which he developed over many years, has been deeply influential in the field of literary criticism. This influence can be seen in such critics such as A O Lovejoy and I A Richard’s. Coleridge is probably best known for his long poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mainer and Christabel. Even those who have never read the Rime have came under his influence: its words have given the English language the metaphor of an albatross around one’s neck, the quotation of “water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink”, and the phrase “a sadder and a wiser man”.
The phrase “all sadder great and small” may have been inspired by the Rime: “He prayeth best, who loveth best;/All things both great and small;/For the dear god who loveth us;/He made and loveth all.”
Christabel is known for its musical rhythm language and its Gothic tale. Kubla khan or A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment, although shorter is also widely known. Both Kubla Khan and Christabel have an additional Romantic aura because they were never finished. Stopford Brooke characterised both poems as having no rival due to their “exquisite metrical movement” and “imaginative phrasing”. Some of his conversational poems are-
The Eohian Harp (1795)
Fears in Solitude (1798)
This Lime- Tree Bower my Prison (1797)
Dejection- An Ode (1802)
To William Wordsworth (1807)
Frost at Midnight (1798)
The above listed poems are entitled “Conversational Poems”. The term itself was coined in 1928 by George McLean Harper, who borrowed the subtitle of The Nightingale: A Conversational Poem (1798) to describe the other poems as well. The poems are considered by many critics to be among Coleridge’s finest verses; thus Harold Bloom has written, “With Dejection, The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight shows Coleridge at his most impressive.” They are also among his most influential poems. The last ten lines of Frost at Midnight were chosen by Harper as the “best example of the peculiar kind of blank verse Coleridge had evolved, as natural-seeming as prose, but as exquisitely artistic as the most complicated sonnet”. The speaker of the poem is addressing his infant son, asleep by his side:
“Therefore all seasons shall be sweet
To thee,
Whether the summer clothe the
General earth
With the greenness, or the redbreast sit
And sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare
Branch
Of mossy apple tree, while the nigh
Thatch’Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the
Eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast, or if the secret ministry of frost,
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet moon.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is one of the remarkable poets of Romantic period. He was a most intimate friend of Wordsworth and their influence on one another was most productive. Coleridge’s poems are removed from the gravity and high seriousness of Spenser, Milton or Wordsworth.