WILLIAM WORDSWORTH : MAN AND NATURE :
Wordsworth Wordsworth is interested in the relationship between the natural natural word and human consciousness. His poetry offers a detailed account of the interaction between man and nature and the influences and sensations from this contact. Wordsworth believed that man and nature are inseparable, inseparable, man exists not outside the natural word but is an active participant. Nature includes includes inanimate and human human nature, it is a source of pleasure pleasure and joy, joy, and it teaches man to love and to act in a moral way. Wordsworth nature was also the world of sense perceptions. He exploited THE SENSE AND MEMORY: For Wordsworth the sensibility of the eye and ear and he believed that we are who we are because of our physical experiences. The use of our senses leads to simple thoughts that then become complex ideas. Wordsworth was interested in how we change through our life and so memory becomes an important source for a poet and permits the poet to give poetry its life and power. Wordsworth claimed imagination as his supreme gift, he used imagination as a synonym of intuition that permitted him to see into reality, reality, but he never admitted a divorce between it and and reality; all genuine poetry poetry takes origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. tranquility. (relationship between past and present experience). Through memory the emotion is reproduced and purified in a poetic form(“kindred emotion”). = object->poet->sensory object->poet->sensory experience->emotion->memorytranquility->kin experience->emotion->memorytranquility->kindred dred emotion->poem->reader->emotion.-> emotion->poem->reader->emotion.-> SAMUEL TAYOL COLERIDGE: IMPORTANCE OF IMAGINATION : 2 KINDS :
-PRIMARY -PRIMARY : connected with human perceptions and the individual power to reproduce images, was the ability to perceive the elements elements of the world and reorder reorder them. Everybody had it and used it unconsciously. unconsciously. -SECONDARY: -SECONDARY: was voluntary and used consciously, while man re-produced re-produce d reality, the poet re-created it and created something original and personal. THE POWER OF FANCY : Fancy was the ability the poet had to use devices like metaphors, alliterations, in order to express ideas. It was the way in which he could communicate his ideas and visions to everybody. everybody. IMPORTANCE OF NATURE: unlike wordsworth , Coleridge didn’t view nature as a moral guide or a source of consolation,. His contemplation of nature was always accompanied by a sort of awareness of the presence of the ideal in the real; he didn’t identify nature with the divine, he saw nature as a sort of perfect world of ideas. primary imagination (Coleridge) (Coleridge) -> recollected in tranquility tranquility (W (Wordsworth) ordsworth) secondary imagination (Coleridge) (Coleridge) -> emotion-copy (Wordsworth) (Wordsworth) JOHN KEATS :
it was his belief in the supreme value of the imagination which made him a romantic poet. The imagination of keats is the fruit of two main form: 1- the world of his poetry is predominantly artificial 2- keats’s poetry stems from imagination in the sense that a great deal of his work is a vision of what he would like human life to be like, stimulated by his own experience of pain and misery. misery. Keats’s poetry BEAUTY THE CENTRAL THEME: contemplation of beauty is the central theme of Keats’s mystery, doubts, without any irritable NEGATIVE CAPABILITY : is the ability to experience “uncertainties, mystery, reaching after fact and reason”. reason”. That is, the poet is able to put aside his self-consciousness, his uncertainties and be open to all experiences, experiences, and so identify with the the object that he is contemplating. contemplating. THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION :
PERCY BYSSE SHELLEY :
freedom and love, he refused any form of tyranny, tyranny, political oppression, social convention, and believed in a better future. Less disciplined than Wordsworth Wordsworth and Coleridge, he believed in the principles of freedom and love which he regarded as remedies for the evil of society. Through love, man could overcome any political, moral and social convention. THE ROLE OF IMAGINATION: Shelley defended poetry as the expression of imagination and understood as revolutionary creativity, creativity, which seriously meant to change the reality of an increasingly material world. However, Shelley’s Shelley’s reality shows itself to be stronger than the ideal and desire, and his world refuses to change. The poet is bound to suffer and and isolates himself from the rest rest of the world, projecting projecting himself into a better future. future. Wordsworth’ss poem, but a beautiful veil that hides the eternal truth of the divine NATURE: isn’t the real world o f Wordsworth’ spirit. Nature represents represents the favourite refuge from the disappointment and injustice of the ordinary ordinary world and the interlocutor of his melancholy dreams and of his hopes for a better future. HIS MAIN THEMES:
