Term Papers on William Wordsworth Biography

Term Paper Title	William Wordsworth Biography
# of Words	808
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	3.23

William Wordsworth Biography

In his first acquaintance with the poetry of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge remarked that "there is a harshness and acerbity connected and combined with words and images all a-glow, which might recall those products of the vegetable world, where gorgeous blossoms rise out of the hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit was elaborating." Coleridge's natural metaphor is revealing, for Wordsworth effected a revolution in poetic language and in the vision of nature. Reacting against the artifice of neo-classicism and its distance from ordinary speech, he sought to restore the spontaneous power of a purified common speech to poetry, embracing all the thorniness of its syntax and the contortions of natural thought. His vision of nature reacted against the scientific and rational universe of the eighteenth century and restored a spiritual power to the natural world, a mighty Presence that coursed through all things. His poetry ranged from divine simplicity, in which he revealed the beauty of nature in a diction stripped of literary artifice, to the great meditative passages that plumbed the mysteries of time's passage and immortality and the dark abyss of infinity in all its terrifying grandeur. Wordsworth yoked together a close attention to the natural world, with passages full of precise detail and fidelity to nature, with a brooding and metaphysical imagination that transformed the natural world into a vast reflection of his own inner moods. As William Hazlitt wrote caustically of Wordsworth's "intense intellectual egotism," the poet rejected the particulars of the world "as interfering with the workings of his own mind, as disturbing the smooth, deep, majestic current of his own feeling." At the heart of Wordsworth's poetry is a cleft between nature as the source of beauty and the imperious and transcendental self that is characteristic of Romantic poetry in general. But the sublimity of his poetry does not suffer from such inconsistencies. As Coleridge was quick to recognize, Wordsworth's genius was "the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed."

Wordsworth's preface to his early Lyrical Ballads announced a radical departure from the classic rhetoric of Pope and its literary diction. Inspired by a deep faith in democracy -- he was initially swept up in the furor of the French Revolution -- he sought to restore the simplicity of common language unsu...

This is ONLY a preview of the article. If you would like to view the entire document, you must subscribe to Digital Term Papers. Please register below now!

Digital Term Papers has over 63,000 essays, term papers, and book notes online. Many paper sites will charge you hundreds of dollars for a single paper. Digital Term Papers only charges $14.95 for a one month membership with instant account activation!

Don't waste anymore time! Join NOW!!!

1 Month (automatic renewal) ($14.95)

3 Months (automatic renewal) ($29.95)

6 Months (one-time billing) ($39.95)

Pay by: