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

2.2 Reflection of romanticism in the works of William Wordsworth
Introduction to Romanticism of William Wordsworth
History has seldom witnessed that a person who instigated a genre of any art form, and the same person went on to become the epitome of it. Take movies, for example. The first-ever movie was directed by a Frenchman named Louis Le Prince. However, instead of Prince, it is the likes of Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, and Satyajit Ray, who are considered as the ultimate masters of filmmaking. William Wordsworth
This fact makes William Wordsworth a rare personality to step on this planet, who not only instigated a genre, Romanticism but is also considered, more or less, the greatest romantic poet. In this document, will study the contributions made by the great master to Romantic Poetry.
Before divulging in the main topic, I would like to discuss a few essential concepts. For instance, we must first establish the meaning and general perception of ‘Romantic Poetry’, and ‘Romanticism’.
Rise of Romantic Poetry
So, what is Romanticism? It was basically a literary and artistic movement that originated during the late 18th Century in Europe. The movement saw artists from various walks of life, like painters, writers, poets, musicians, singers, etc. glorify the subtleties and beauty of nature, emotions, and past. Romanticism saw the birth of a new genre of poetry, which was later christened as the ‘Romantic Poetry’. The period between the late 1780s & 1790s until the 1850s came to be known as the ‘Romantic Age’. The famous poets, apart from William Wordsworth, of the Romantic Age include William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Walter Alva Scott, Robert Burns, and Lord Byron.⁴
The age was inspired by a series of events which took place in Europe after the mid 18th Century, and the most prominent among those were the Industrial Revolution (1760-1820), and the French Revolution (1789-1799). Romanticism had a significant effect on the sociopolitical scenario of Europe, and then later, of South America, as the romantic thinkers had a great influence on strong social values like liberalism, radicalism, conservatism, and patriotism.
The history of ‘Romantic Poetry’ as a separate genre can be traced back to 1798 after William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the famous collection of poems titled ‘Lyrical Ballads’. Since then till the 1850s, the genre saw a flamboyant reign, and a number of great poets emerged, the most prominent of whom still remains Wordsworth.
The most popular group emerging from the age of romantic poetry is the one called “Lake Poets”. These include Wordsworth himself, ST Coleridge, and Robert Southey. The Lake Poets were those who settled by the lakes in northwestern England, a territory rightly known as the Lake District, which was by glorified the beauty of the countryside extensively in their respective works.
The main problem, as Francis Jeffrey wrote in the Edinburgh Review, was Wordsworth’s use of subjects that the ‘greater part of his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting’. The reviewer in The Satirist wondered how anyone could think it worthwhile to write about his memories of some daffodils blowing in the wind. (53)
We generally accept that poems can be about any topic, but Wordsworth’s contemporaries felt that a poem that claimed to describe some powerful experience should also have a worthy subject. Daffodils simply don’t cut it.
Even Wordsworth’s friend Coleridge was critical. In a chapter in his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge complains that “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” describes “thoughts and images too great for the subject” (II, 136). The description is beautiful, but it would be better bestowed on something more impressive.
Over time, however, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” won over its readers, and it is now Wordsworth’s most famous poem.
Wordsworth shared many of the Romantic qualities described. In 1798 he and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a small anthology of poems called Lyrical Ballads, in which they sought to share a new kind of poetry. Wordsworth’s poems in particular are frequently focused on common people, on natural scenes, and on seemingly trivial actions. In the prefaces to subsequent editions, Wordsworth also explained his theory of poetry.
Here is an excerpt from the 1800 preface:
The principal object then which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language. (244-45)
You can see how Romantic these aims are: the individual’s essential nature is most clearly expressed in moments of great passion and emotion, and, since people are less inhibited and artificial in the countryside, we might do well to study rustic scenes and common language.
In the 1802 version, Wordsworth added that although the language is meant to seem realistic, he did add “a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way” (245). In other words, there should also be room for the poet to express his own passionate response to the scenes he describes. This is where Romantics praised the imagination as the greatest mental faculty.
Later in the preface, Wordsworth described the poetic process as follows:
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. (266)
You’ll notice that this describes what happens in “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” In a quiet and tranquil moment, the poet remembers the beauty of the daffodils and recalls how overcome he was by the sight. As he dwells on the memory, the emotions all come flooding back. He is then able to write about the whole experience–not only what happened originally, but also the subsequent remembering.