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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.
Typifying the ideals of the Romantic movement, Wordsworth argues that poetry should be understood by the common person and should use everyday language. This is in contrast to the poetic style cultivated by 18th-century classicist poets like Alexander Pope and Thomas Gray, which strove for loftiness of effect and often employed a special “poetic” vocabulary not used in ordinary conversation. Further, Wordsworth argues in favor of choosing as the subjects of poetry “incidents and situations from common life” (2). His rationale is that poetry expresses human emotions—unlike science, which seeks a more abstract and impersonal truth—and thus should remain close to human feelings, concerns, and modes of expression.
Wordsworth’s emphasis on bringing poetry to the level of the common person reflects the democratic ideals of the Romantic movement, inspired in part by the American and French Revolutions. Romanticist artists advocated the idea that art should appeal to the many instead of being the province of an intellectual or aristocratic elite—who were the traditional patrons of art from the Renaissance through the 18th century. Not only were common people the proper audience for poetry, but they could also be a worthy subject for poetry because they lived (in many cases) close to
By William Wordsworth
A Complaint
William Wordsworth
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
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Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
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Daffodils
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I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
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Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
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London, 1802
William Wordsworth
Lyrical Ballads
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My Heart Leaps Up
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Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
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She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways
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She Was a Phantom of Delight
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The Prelude
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The Solitary Reaper
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The World is Too Much with Us
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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
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We are Seven
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