Being as an English literature student I have always
welcomed the chance of learning new ideas. I have seen myself as a small fish
in this vast ocean of whose vastness I really don’t seem to have any idea. Although I
have been a part of it since 3 years but every time I come across any new piece
of work I have felt myself as a beginner, who have just started to know what
literature is all about and the aura that it carries within itself.
I underwent a similar experience when I first read about
Wordsworth – the man of romantic poetry!! Well let me make out very clear here
itself, “romantic” doesn’t just mean what we (as the 21st century
generation) perceive about it!! It is much more than our imagination can ever
think about!! Romantics…romanticism…were much sought after words in post neo-classical
age (18th century). Imagination was a fundamental part of that era.
Poets of this age like William Wordsworth, S.T.Coleridge and so on were
conscious of a wonderful capacity to create imaginary worlds. This belief in
imagination was part of the contemporary belief in individual self. The
romantics created the worlds of their own and also succeeded in persuading
others that their world were not merely fanciful!! Their aim was to convey the
mystery of things through individual manifestations; they appeal not to the
logical mind but to the complete self, to the whole range of intellectual
faculties, senses and emotions.
In nature all the romantic poets found their initial
inspiration. Through it they found those exalting moments when they passed from
sight to vision and pierced to the secrets of the universe. Nature lifted
Wordsworth out of himself; he sought for a higher state in which its soul and
the soul of man should be united in a single harmony. As a romantic poet his task
was to find through the imagination some transcendental order, which explains
the world of appearances and accounts not merely for the existence of visible
things but for the effect, which they have on us, for the sudden beating of the
heart in the presence of beauty. His poetry serves to enlighten the whole
conscious self of man; wake the imagination to the reality, which lies behind
familiar things; it makes us see that mere logic is not enough and that what we
need is inspired intuition.
Wordsworth says that the duty of the poetry is ‘to treat
things not as they are, but as they appear, not as they exist in themselves,
but as they seem to exist to the senses…’. His poem “Tintern Abbey” distils and
retells the maturation process of the poet himself, his imagination and his
relationship with Nature through a narrative of Wordsworth time spend on the banks of Wye River and his remembrances of it.
Wordsworth produced a style of poetry which was psychologically persuasive and
based on direct autobiographical experience. In his view poetry was a
philosophical vehicle and meditative activity formed from ‘emotion recollected
in tranquillity’; it was a means of apprehending a natural landscape charged
with divine significance. His poetry is the poetry of consciousness becoming
aware of itself, a poetry of transcendence in which individual soul touches
Divinity by putting aside the petty needs of ego and materialistic
distractions. He achieved morality from nature; it was “the anchor of my purest
thoughts/the nurse, the guide, the guardians of my heart and soul”.
