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William WordsworthA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“[…] fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation [...]”
The quote emphasizes two important things about Wordsworth’s poetry: He uses everyday language adapted to poetic meter and rhythms, and he tries to express the strong emotions of human beings as they react to various life experiences. Moreover, Wordsworth emphasizes the formal aspects of poetry as vehicles of pleasure for the reader.
“[…] if the views with which [the poems] were composed were indeed realized, a class of Poetry would be produced, well adapted to interest mankind permanently […]”
“The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect […]”
Reemphasizing his practice of using everyday language in his poems, Wordsworth states further that he wants to go beyond the mundane by exploiting the realm of the imagination. He wants to present the subjects of his poems, which are ordinary in themselves and often taken from the sights and sounds of nature, in an unusual light that will surprise and stimulate the reader’s mind.
By William Wordsworth
A Complaint
William Wordsworth
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
William Wordsworth
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
William Wordsworth
Daffodils
William Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...
William Wordsworth
London, 1802
William Wordsworth
Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
My Heart Leaps Up
William Wordsworth
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
William Wordsworth
She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways
William Wordsworth
She Was a Phantom of Delight
William Wordsworth
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
The Solitary Reaper
William Wordsworth
The World Is Too Much with Us
William Wordsworth
To the Skylark
William Wordsworth
We Are Seven
William Wordsworth
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