William Wordsworth as the Quintessential Romantic Poet

¶ … William Wordsworth as the quintessential Romantic poet - a man in love with the idea of a simple life lived close to nature - that we are apt to overlook the fact that his relationship with nature is in fact a somewhat ambivalent one, or at least a complex one.

While Wordsworth will always be known for the clarity and undiluted Romanticism of "Tintern Abbey," to assume that his stance vis-a-vis nature in this poem constitutes an adequate description of all of his connections to and understandings of the external world does him a disservice. To do so would be to equate his passion for the natural world and the necessity of direct human connection to nature for a simple-minded sort of tendency to ramble on about beauty.

Rather, if we look beyond "Tintern Abbey" to the whole body of his work, we came to a fuller understanding of the ways in which he embraced the human as well as the natural world around him. "St. Paul's," a poem that Wordsworth penned in 1808 but never published, is an excellent instrument to use through which to discover the complex worldview of this poet.

It may be argued that Wordsworth's ever-shifting, ever becoming more refined ideas about his own place in the world (and the meaning of human life lived in the world) reflected continual changes in his understanding of his calling as one particular kind of poet as opposed to another.

The poet who speaks to us of such bliss in finding his soul wedded to the natural world in his early poems, who shakes off the constraints of classical meter and rhyme altogether in his 18th-century poems comes at the end of his life to a different sense of his place in the universe and in doing so also transforms the voice in which he speaks.

For his vision of his relationship to the world beyond his own experiences is throughout his life a shaping element of his poetic voice, and as this vision changes so does his style (Lucas 1975). We will in fact see that by the end of his life, by the middle of the 19th century, that Wordsworth is a man humbled before the expansiveness of the human mind, of the power of imagination.

"The Prelude," which Wordsworth added to over a number of years and which is clearly in fundamental ways (even if not in all of the particulars) autobiographical in fact serves as a far better keystone for understanding Wordsworth's work as a whole than does a poem like "Tintern Abbey" or even "St. Paul's" - although reading "St. Paul's" in the context of "The Prelude" provides insights both into the earlier poem and in to Wordsworth's understanding (at least in 1808) of the relationship between city and country, between God and imagination.

The importance of these elements is impossible to dismiss in a poem like "The Prelude," in which Wordsworth writes (in Book 14) This spiritual Love acts not nor can it exist Without Imagination, which, in truth, Is but another name for absolute power And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, And Reason in her most exalted mod.

While there are certainly moments of Christian orthodoxy in "The Prelude," and glimpses of Wordsworth as the worshipper of nature, this poem is finally a celebration not of a Romantic ideal of a religion of nature but of "the mind of man." Wordsworth has learned that he is worthy himself, that he is sufficient unto himself in a way that was not possible when he was younger.

Needing neither God nor Nature to support him, he comes in the end to a greater appreciation of both of these as well as of himself. We can see "St. Paul's as serving in many ways as an introduction to these issues. Perhaps Wordsworth felt that at this time they were still too insufficiently developed to be published (Hill 1989). The mode of both "St. Paul's" and "The Prelude" poem seems to be that of the Christian confessional in which Wordsworth as a modern-day St.

Augustine has cast himself in the role of a man who is trying to place his life within the proper Christian framework. But while he does this at times, at others he offers a rather radical rereading of the Christian narrative; the transformation that he experiences at the end of these poems is not that of a St. Paul, humbled before his God (Fiero 1997).

Rather, it is a man who, looking upon one of the great human creations designed to honor Christian faith, sees the seen before him in essentially pagan terms, sees the older, natural order of the world subsuming this transgression. This is a world in which the power of winter has silenced and stilled all human and divine activity.

Wordsworth - or rather Nature - has erased the overlay of Christian civilization from this scene: Moving Form was none Save here and there a shadowy Passenger, Slow, shadowy, silent, dusky, and beyond And high above this winding length of street, This noiseless and unpeopled avenue, Pure, silent, solemn, beautiful, was seen The hugh majestic Temple of St. Paul In awful sequestration, through a veil, Through its own sacred veil of falling snow.

It is essential, in seeking to understand this poem, to place both it and Wordsworth, within the larger Romantic tradition. Romanticism developed in the 19th century both in relationship to previous artistic styles and as a result of the political and historical forces that were reshaping the world during this century.

Romanticism as a style was linked to a larger social movement that tried to upset the orderly conventions laid down by the Enlightenment in which everyone had a place in society that they were supposed to know and be happy with. It was also a protest against the Industrial Revolution and the ways that industrialization forced people to give up ways of life that they had followed for centuries.

This latter aspect of Romanticism is especially evident "Tintern Abbey." Poetry, Wordsworth would write in the preface to the second edition of Ballads, which appeared in 1801, that the source of poetic truth is the direct experience of the senses that "emotion recollected in tranquility." Both this tranquility and the continuing urge to a connection with the natural world are repeated in these later lines of "Tintern Abbey." Therefore am I still A.