William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was the central figure in the English
Romantic revolution in poetry. His contribution to it was threefold. First, he
formulated in his poems and his essays a new attitude toward nature. This was
more than a matter of introducing nature imagery into his verse: it amounted to
a fresh view of the organic relation between man and the natural world, and it
culminated in metaphors of a wedding between nature and the human mind and,
beyond that, in the sweeping metaphor of nature as emblematic of the mind of
God, a mind that “feeds upon infinity” and “broods over the dark abyss.”
Second, Wordsworth probed deeply into his own sensibility as he traced, in his
finest poem, The Prelude, the “growth of a poet’s mind.” The Prelude was in
fact the first long autobiographical poem. Writing it in a drawn-out process of
self-exploration, Wordsworth worked his way toward a modern psychological
understanding of his own nature and, thus, more broadly, of human nature.
Third, Wordsworth placed poetry at the centre of human experience; in
impassioned rhetoric he pronounced poetry to be nothing less than “the first
and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man,” and he then
went on to create some of the greatest English poetry of his century. It is
probably safe to say that by the late 20th century he stood in critical
estimation where Coleridge and Arnold had originally placed him, next to John
Milton—who stands, of course, next to William Shakespeare.
(References: https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wordsworth/The-Recluse-and-The-Prelude)
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