Introduction to Romanticism.
“Romantic Nature” (47-49). William Wordsworth intro., “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey” and “Nutting” (19-24), “What is a Poet?” and “Emotion Recollected in Tranquility” (29-30).
12: John Keats, (59-63). Giacomo Leopardi, “The Infinite”

     Find out how the romantic view of nature differed from the Enlightenment view.
     What is the distinction between the “pastoral” and the “sublime.” Which versions of beauty in nature do the poems we have to read emphasize? Note—some emphasize pastoral, some sublime, some both, at different moments.

 

Believe it or not, Wordsworth is thought to have written in more common language than poets who preceded him. True, but not our common language. Here are a couple of strategies to make the poems more available.
      a. Read the lines as if they were written on a single line--as prose is. This prevents the natural tendency to break up the rhythm by stopping at the end of a line (even when reading out loud, no stopping at the end of a line unless there is punctuation).
     b. Don't be intimidated by the super-long sentences. Just follow the sense, and try to keep the whole sentence in your mind as you go.
     c. perhaps most importantly, don't be overwhelmed by the language, and let the story that someone like Wordsworth is telling come through. For example, in the third stanza, beginning around line 58, here's the story.
"I'm here where I once beheld nature, remembering that time imperfectly (you know how it is with memory). I hope I can take this experience with me and maintain the sense of enjoyment in the future. I know that as a youth immersed in nature I could really let myself go, and be a thing in nature. I loved that, but now, with age, "That time is past,/ And all its aching joys are now no more,/ And all its dizzy raptures.' But I'm OK with that, because now, with more mature sensibility, I'm able to transform my experiences into thoughts, words, and with a little luck, some decent lines of verse."
One can go throught the poem and take the sense of it in this manner--perhaps adding even greater enjoyment of the poetic form of expression employed by WW.


1. The poem “Tintern Abbey” hinges on the notion of the past as compared to the present experience of this particular natural region. What lines most explicitly describe how the speaker of the poem experienced nature in the past (you might mark these lines in your book)? What lines show the difference in the way he experiences nature in the present?
2. On line 85 the speaker begins a thought: “Not for this/ Faint I, nor mourn not murmur; other gifts/ Have followed;/ for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense.” What are these gifts, or what is this recompense, of which he speaks?
3. To what does the title “Nutting” refer? What is the first description of the scene (lines 16-21)? How does this differ from the way the “shady nook” is described at the end of the poem? What has happened between the time the speaker enters this wood and the time that he departs? What is Wordsworth trying to say about the nature of man?

4. How would you explain the references in Keats “Ode to a Nightingale,” to wine, opium, and lethe? Are these negative or positive commodities to the speaker of the poem?
5. Why is is that the speaker of the poem is unable to “see what flowers are at [his] feet” (line 41)? How does the state he finds himself in affect him?
6. In the poem “To Autumn,” Keats celebrates a season that is often negatively compared to Spring. The poem is a poem of sensory experience. What sense is emphasized in stanza 2, and which sense emphasized in stanza 3?