19 pages • 38 minutes read
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, Michael Schmidt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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, Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, Stephen Gill
The Solitary Reaper
William Wordsworth
The World is Too Much with Us
William Wordsworth
The World's Best Poetry, Volume 5 (Part 1): Nature
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mary Mapes Dodge, George Darley, William Motherwell, George Eliot, John Milton, Clement Scott, George Arnold, Robert Browning, James Thomson, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., William Ernest Henley, Denis Florence MacCarthy, William Cullen Bryant, John Sterling, John Clare, Izaak Walton, Matthew Arnold, James Whitcomb Riley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edward Jenner, William Gilmore Simms, Charles G.D. Roberts, Henry Timrod, William Cox Bennett, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, George MacDonald, William Shakespeare, Matthias Claudius, Alexander Hume, James Beattie, Thomas Gray, Craig Franklin, John Cunningham, Norman Rowland Gale, James Gates Percival, Joel Benton, Thomas Heywood, Richard Hovey, Anna Boynton Averill, Charles Sangster, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dora Hill Read Goodale, Joanna Baillie, Thomas Nashe, Henry Wotton, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, John Howard Bryant, John G.C. Brainard, Thomas Campbell, Eduard Mörike, Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, David Gray, William Cowper, W.B. Yeats, William Prescott Foster, Richard Henry Dana Jr., Thomas Carew, William Howitt, John B. Tabb, Jones Very, Henry Fielding, Barry Cornwall, Samuel Daniel, John Keats, Homer, George Francis Savage-Armstrong, John Leyden, Tomas Peter, Thomas Hood, Philip Pendleton Cooke, Richard Watson Gilder, Ethelwyn Wetherald, William Wordsworth, Euripides, Joseph Blanco White, Edmund Clarence Stedman, G.W. Pettee, Robert Tannahill, Ebenezer Jones, John Chalkhill, Abraham Cowley, Paul Hamilton Hayne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Russell Lowell, Andrew Marvell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lisle Bowles, Leanne Yau, Charles Harpur, Sonia, Edith M. Thomas, Charles Kingsley, Lord Byron, Ebenezer Elliott, Benjamin Franklin Taylor, Richard Henry Horne, Jason in Panama, Walter Scott, Hartley Coleridge, Duncan Campbell Scott, Alfred Tennyson, John Davies, Aristophanes, Charles G. Eastman, Elizabeth Roberts MacDonald, William Browne, Robert Burns, Samuel Rogers, Ludwig H.C. Hölty, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Celia Laighton Thaxter
To the Skylark
William Wordsworth
We are Seven
William Wordsworth
Art
View Collection
Books About Art
View Collection
Books & Literature
View Collection
British Literature
View Collection
Earth Day
View Collection
Essays & Speeches
View Collection
Philosophy, Logic, & Ethics
View Collection
Required Reading Lists
View Collection
Romanticism / Romantic Period
View Collection