To evaluate My assignment
“William wordsworth as a literary critic”
Name: RINKAL JANI
Roll No: 30
Paper: 03
Paper Name: Literary theory and criticism
Topic: “William wordsworth as a literary critic”
M.A. English Semester – 1s
Batch: 2016 - 2018
Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Submitted to: -
Dr. Dilip Barad,
Department of English
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
William wordsworth as a literary critic
“Wordsworth is a poet who never seems far from critic’s”
Introduction:
William wordsworth is a major English Romantic poet. He was primarily a poet not a critic, he started writing in The Neo Classical Age. He went beyond the Neo Classical view. He wrote lyrical Ballads combine authorship of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Wordsworth through his literary criticism demolished the old and the faulty and opens out new vistas and avenues. Let’s have an overlook on William wordsworth as literary critic, his contribution to the English literature and his major work’s. He was p William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
William wordsworth as a literary critic: Wordsworth’s criticism is of far-reaching historical significance. When Wordsworth started, it was the Neo-classical criticism, which held the day. Critics were pre-occupied with poetic genres, poetry was judged on the basis of rules devised by Aristotle and other ancients, and interpreted by the Italian and French critics. They cared for rules, for methods, for outward form, and had nothing to say about the substance, the soul of poetry. Wordsworth is the first critic to turn from the poetry to its substance; builds a theory of poetry, and gives an account of the nature of the creative process. His emphasis is on novelty, experiment, liberty, spontaneity, inspiration and imagination, as contrasted with the classical emphasis on authority, tradition, and restraint. His ‘Preface’ is an unofficial manifesto of the English Romantic Movement giving it a new direction, consciousness and program. After Wordsworth had written, literary criticism could never be the same as before.
Wordsworth through his literary criticism demolishes the old and the faulty and opens out new vistas and avenues. He discards the artificial and restricted forms of approved 18th century poetry. Disgusted by the, “gaudiness and inane phraseology”, of many modern writers, he criticizes poets who:
… separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.
Discarding formal finish and perfection, he stresses vivid sensation and spontaneous feeling.He says:
All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
Scott James says:
He discards Aristotelian doctrine. For him, the plot, or situation, is not the first thing. It is the feeling that matters.
Reacting against the artificiality of 18th century poetry, he advocates simplicity both in theme and treatment. He advocates a deliberate choice of subject from “humble and rustic life”. Instead of being pre-occupied with nymphs and goddesses, he portrays the emotions of collage girls and peasants. There is a healthy realism in his demand that the poet should use, “the language of common men”, and that he should aim at keeping, “the reader in the company of flesh and blood.”
There is, no doubt, his views in this respect are open to criticism. Scott James points out, the flesh and blood and emotions of a townsman are not more profound. Besides, by confining himself wholly to rustic life, he excluded many essential elements in human experience. Thus, he narrowed down his range.
His insistence on the use of a selection of language really used by men is always in danger of becoming trivial and mean.
There is also, no doubt, that he is guilty of over-emphasis every now and then, and that it is easy to pick holes in his theories. Coleridge could easily demolish his theory of poetic diction and demonstrate that a selection of language as advocated by Wordsworth would differ in no way from the language of any other man of commonsense.
All the same, the historical significance of his criticism is very great. It served as a corrective to the artificial and inane phraseology and emphasized the value of a simpler and more natural language. By advocating simplicity in theme, he succeeded in enlarging the range of English poetry. He attacked the old, outdated and trivial and created a taste of the new and the significant. He emphasized the true nature of poetry as an expression of emotion and passion, and so dealt a death blow to the dry intellectuality of contemporary poetry. In this way, he brought about a revolution in the theory of poetry, and made popular acceptance of the new poetry, the romantic poetry, possible.
Unlike other romantics, Wordsworth also lays stress on the element of thought in poetry. He has a high conception of his own calling and so knows that great poetry cannot be produced by a careless or thoughtless person. He says:
Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.
Poetic process is a complex one. Great poetry is not produced on the spur of the moment. It is produced only when the original emotion is contemplated in tranquility, and the poet passions anew.
Wordsworth goes against the neo-classic view that poetry should both instruct and delight, when he stresses that the function of poetry is to give pleasure, a noble and exalted kind of pleasure which results from increased understanding and sympathy. If at all it teaches, it does so only indirectly, by purifying the emotions, uplifting the soul, and bringing it nearer to nature.
The credit for democratizing the conception of the poet must go to Wordsworth. According to him, the poet is essentially a man who differs from other men not in kind, but only in degree. He has a more lively sensibility, a more comprehensive soul, greater powers of observation, imagination and communication. He is also a man who has thought long and deep. Wordsworth emphasizes his organic oneness as also the need for his emotional identification with other men.
His works are… Works of wordsworth
His works are…
‘Lyrical Ballads’ ‘The Excursion’ ‘ We are Seven’
‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’
‘Tintern Abbey’
‘The Prelude’
‘The ldiot Boy’
He basically writes poetry, Wordsworth's personality and poetry were deeply influenced by his love of nature, especially by the sights and scenes of the Lake Country, in which he spent most of his mature life. A profoundly earnest and sincere thinker, he displayed a high seriousness comparable, at times, to Milton's but tempered with tenderness and a love of simplicity.
Wordsworth's earlier work shows the poetic beauty of commonplace things and people as in "Margaret,""Peter Bell,""Michael," and "The Idiot Boy." His use of the language of ordinary speech was heavily criticized, but it helped to rid English poetry of the more artificial conventions of 18th-century diction. Among his other well-known poems are "Lucy" ("She dwelt among the untrodden ways"), "The Solitary Reaper,""Resolution and Independence,""Daffodils,""The Rainbow," and the sonnet "The World Is Too Much with Us."
Although Wordsworth was venerated in the 19th cent., by the early 20th cent. his reputation had declined. He was criticized for the unevenness of his poetry, for his rather marked capacity for bathos, and for his transformation from an open-minded liberal to a cramped conservative. In recent years, however, Wordsworth has again been recognized as a great English poet—a profound, original thinker who created a new poetic tradition. The Poetry of Wordsworth:
Wordsworth has in favour of simple poetic diction but he himself has not followed his own rule, his poetries are easy to read but not to understand, reader could get the pleasure but not the hidden meaning. As in his poem “Lucy”:
A violet by a mossy stone,
Half hidden from the eye;
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
Wordsworth was strongly believed that man and nature shouldbe portrayed as they are. He is not always melodious, but he is seldom graceful. He is absolutely without humour.
After his longer works his first good book as per critics was Selections with short poems, after reading these poems we come to know that Wordsworth is the greatest nature poet that ever has been produced by our literature. No other poet has found such beauty in nature as Wordsworth has described. He had a strong belief that all nature is the reflection of the living God, all his contemporary writers like Cowper, Burns, Keats, and Tennyson were providing the out ward aspects of nature in varying degrees but Wordsworth gives you her very life, and the experience of man with the nature. While reading his poetry the reader could feel the touch of nature, the experience of wonderland and memory of our own childhood
Wordsworth’s philosophy toward human life is very simple that man is not apart from nature, but is the very “life of her life.” Wordsworth has connected birth with nature and he expressed this gladness with poetry that the child comes straight from the Creator of nature:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
But trailing cloud of glory do we come
From God, who is our home”
In “Intimations of Immorality from recollections of Early Childhood” and in “The Retreat” he has summed up his childhood and philosophy; In “Tintern Abbey”, “The Rainbow”, “Ode to Duty” and “Intimation of Immorality” it is plain teaching; In “Michael,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “to a Highland Girl,”“Stepping Westward,” he tries to suggests the joy and sorrow not of princes or kings but of a common life. He has described his whole life in “The Prelude” and “The Recluse” is the treat to nature.
Conclusion:
We can do no better than conclude this account of the achievement of Wordsworth as a critic with the words of “Rene Wellek”:
Wordsworth thus holds a position in the history of criticism which must be called ambiguous or transitional. He inherited from neo-classicism a theory of the imitation of nature to which he gives, however, a specific social twist: he inherited from the 18th century a view of poetry as passion and emotion which he again modified as … “recollection in tranquility”. He takes up rhetorical ideas about the effect of poetry but extends and amplifies them into a theory of the social effects of literature … he also adopts a theory of poetry in which imagination holds the central place as a power of unification and ultimate insight into the unity of the world. Though Wordsworth left only a small body of criticism, it is rich in survivals, suggestions, anticipations and personal insights.
Citation:
Deepti joshi's Assignment: Wordsworth as Critic and his views on subject matter of poetry
Wikipedia
http://littcritic.blogspot.in/2014/01/william-wordsworth.html
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