1. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Let the Romantic Period Begin….

2. Lyrical Ballads Published in 1798 Tintern Abbey
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Began the Romantic Period

3. William Wordsworth 1770-1850 Orphaned in 1783
Degree from Cambridge, 1791
No head for business
1791, went to France to learn the language
Inspired by Revolution

4. William Wordsworth Disillusioned about potential for change
Reunited with sister, Dorothy
1795, inherited money
1797, met Coleridge
1798, Lyrical Ballads

5. The Best Poet of the Age
Poetry: “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” produced by someone who has “thought long and deeply” (Wordsworth).

6. “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways”
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
This suggests?
This suggests?

7. -- Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
This is one of five “Lucy” poems. How did he feel about Lucy?
This suggests?
Did you see
this coming?

8. The World is Too Much With Us
1807
Sonnet: 14 lines, shift in thought
Wordsworth realized his creative powers were beginning to fail
Response to accusations of conspiring against society, being an enemy of society

9. The World is Too Much With Us
a The world is too much with us; late and soon,
b Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
b Little we see in Nature that is ours;
a We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
a This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
b The winds that will be howling at all hours,
b And are upgathered now like sleeping flowers;
a For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
Tone?

10. The World is Too Much With Us
How did the pagans differ from today’s men?
The World is Too Much With Us
c It moves us not. –Great God! I’d rather be
d A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
c So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
d Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
c Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
d Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
Would we be happier if we were more ‘in tune’?
Is this still pertinent today?
Tone?

11. Literary Form Sonnet Italian, Petrarchan: octave and sestet
Shakespearean: 3 quatrains, couplet
Ode
uses heightened, impassioned language
addresses an object

12. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
left university with no degree – commitment to utopian colony in America
depressed: addiction to opium, failed marriage
“Sage of Highgate”
profound philosopher and guiding spirit

13. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Called Wordsworth the “the best poet of the age”
Wordsworth called Coleridge “the most wonderful man I’ve ever known”
Loneliness came from lifelong need for affection and support not available in an isolated writer’s life

14. Love of Language
Kubla Khan p. 846

15. Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Exploration of the ‘unreal’/imagination
‘Ballad’ in seven sections
Love
Shame
Isolation
Page 820

16. Albatross