Romanticism and William Wordsworth

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is considered as a real and living being, a vehicle for self-consciousness, a source of sensations; and as an expressive language, in fact natural images provide the poet with a way of thinking about human feelings and the self. THE SUBLIME Nature is a place where our soul can unleash to its melancholy and it's a reality that reveals its mysterious part, producing in us the feeling of the sublime: it is an idea of beauty very different from the classical idea of beauty and that makes us feel distressed and dismayes, something that fascinates us but at the same time frightens us. THE GOTHIC NOVEL: CHARATERISTICS A great importance is given to fear and terror, which is caused by evil and atrocity and darkness is a necessary ingredient for the mysterious and gloomy atmosphere. The settings are usually isolated castles and mysterious abbeys with hidden passages, underground cellars and secret rooms; Catholic countries are the setting for the most terrible crimes, due to Protestant prejudices against Catholicism. Characters are dominated by exaggerated reactions in front of mysterious situations or events and supernatural beings, such as vampires, monsters and ghosts are very typical of this genre. THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION Dreams and imagination are a creative power that's superior to reason and it shaped the poets' fleeting visions into concrete forms. Imagination is also a dynamic, active, rather than passive, power and it allows human beings to read nature as a system of symbols. THE LAKE POETS William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were known as the Lake Poets because they lived together in the last few years of the 18th century in the district of the Great Lakes in Northwestern England and in 1798 they published the Lyrical Ballads, the manifesto of English Romanticism. PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS Wordsworth raises the question: who is the poet? The poet is a man speaking to men, he is not different from others, he is simply someone who communicates with others, so he sets himself the objective of speaking directly to all, choosing as the object of his poetry common and everyday life. MAN AND NATURE William Wordsworth believes that man and nature are inseparable, adopting a pantheistic view of nature, according to which nature is the seat of the spirit of the universe; nature comforts man in sorrow, it is a source of joy and pleasure, and teaches man to love and behave in a moral and ethical way. THE SENSES AND MEMORY Wordsworth exploited the sensibility of the eye and ear to perceive the beauty of nature; the sensations caused by physical experience lead to simple thoughts, which later combine into more complex and organised ideas; the poet believes that memory is a major force in the process of growth of the poet's mind. THE POET'S TASK The poet is drawn almost as a teacher and he shows men how to understand their feelings and improve their moral being and draws attention to the ordinary things of life where the deepest emotions are to be found. I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD The poet, during a walk in the Lake District, saw a great quantity of daffodils, which made him feel in contact with nature and which he personifies, by describing them as a dancing crowd, whose beauty is superior to anything else. The poem is divided into 4 stanzas: In the first stanza he is alone when suddenly he sees a host of daffodils. In the second stanza the poet says that he sees ten thousand daffodils and compares them to the stars that shine in the Milky Way. In the third stanza the poet is currently happy because the flowers make him feel peaceful and in contact with nature. In the fourth stanza the poet is at home remembering the sensations that he felt seeing those flowers. This poem is a perfect example of those "emotions recollected in tranquillity", in fact he does not describe the moment when he had seen the flowers but the memory of that moment.