1. William Wordwsworth Benjamin Robert Haydon, William Wordsworth,
1842, London,
National Portrait Gallery.

2. Attracted by the new democratic ideas
His life
1770
Cockermouth
Cumberland
Lake district
Attracted by the new democratic ideas
1791
Journey to France
Love affair with Annette Vallon
A daughter, Caroline
Ostracism by his family
Lack of money
War between England
and France
Compelled to return to England
Sense of guilt and failure
Married Mary Hutchinson

3. Friendship with Coleridge
1795
He met Coleridge
Long and productive friendship
Same love for nature and poetry
It was through Coleridge’s influence that Wordsworth passed from his fragmentary ideas upon impressions and emotions to a philosophical theory
Appointed as Poet Laureate in 1843
He died in 1850

4. An incomplete philosophical poem
Works
1798
Lyrical ballads
anonymous
This edition contains the famous Preface
1800
Lyrical ballads
1807
Poems in two volumes
An incomplete philosophical poem
in 9 books
1814
The excursion
1850
The Prelude
Autobiographical poem in 14 books
(posthumous)

5. Lyrical ballads Unlike anything that had come before,
and paved the way for everything that has come after
A collection of poems written in cooperation by Wordsworth and Coleridge
would attempt to make the common uncommon
would try through poetic means to make the uncommon (supernatural) credible
It was not received well

6. Why Lyrical Ballads? Lyric
In ancient Greece, a lyric was a song to accompany music from a lyre . Later the word was used for any short poem in which personal moods and emotions were expressed. Nowadays the words of popular songs are called lyrics.
Ballad
A ballad is a poem or song which usually tells a story in the popular language of the day, and has associations with traditional folk culture.

7. The poet of nature Far from being a decorative background (Augustans)
pantheism
Endowed with a spirit and a life of her own
nature is a kind of religion in which he has the utmost faith
He celebrates the idea of fusion between man and his natural element
people become selfish and immoral when they distance themselves from nature by living in cities
he believed in the apprehension of reality through the senses

8. What is poetry?
Poetry is not the masterly use of imagery and ornament and it does not depend on rhetorical devices
Poetry is a form of knowledge which is based on concrete experience. It has its origins in sensations and spontaneous feelings which are transformed into emotions.
“emotions recollected in tranquillity”
same effect on the reader

9. Creating poetry Object Sensory experience Emotion
Recollection in tranquillity
Poem
Kindred emotion
Memory
Reader
Emotion
Creating poetry
Reader

10. The splendour of childhood
Upon being born, human beings move from a perfect, idealized realm into the imperfect, un-ideal earth.
As children, some memory of the former purity and glory in which they lived remains
But as children grow older, the memory fades, and the magic of nature dies.
Still, the memory of childhood can offer an important consolation, which brings with it almost a kind of re-access to the lost purities of the past.

11. The power of memory
Memory allows Wordsworth’s speakers to overcome the harshness of the contemporary world
Recollecting their childhoods gives adults a chance to reconnect with the intense relationship they had with nature as children and they are happy again.
Considering his own mortality, memory is again a huge comfort.
The act of remembering also allows the poet to write

12. A physical sense of Universe
He exploited the sensibility of his eye and ear
Through his ear he could perceive the sounds of the woods, of the birds, of the waters, but also the silence of solitary places. Through his eyes he could see the loveliness of the natural world penetrating the ideal truth that lay behind it.
Influence of associationist philosopher David Hartley

13. What is a poet? Not a man in an ivory tower but a man among men
He has got a prophet-like ability to reflect on nature in order to “ see into the life of things”.
“What is a poet? […] He is a man speaking to men: a man […] endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind”.
From the Preface to Lyrical ballads

14. The poet’s task
He must teach men to improve their feelings and their moral life by drawing attention to the ordinary things of life where the deepest emotion are to be found.
This can be achieved not through the language of reason but through the language of imagination

15. “ A certain colouring of imagination”
Poetry should deal with everyday situations or incidents and with ordinary people, especially humble, rural people.
In low and rustic life man is more direct, since he is in close contact with nature and nearer to his own pre-passions.
Imagination is to play a very important role
“The principal object […] was to choose incidents and situations from common life […] and at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary thing should be presented to the mind in an usual aspect”
From the Preface to Lyrical ballads

16. A new language Poetic diction 18th century poetry
dominated by admiration for the correctness of phrase and urbanity of the Latin poets Virgil and Horace
Poetic diction
18th century poetry
imitation of an elegant and polished language codified in stereotyped formulas
The language of poetry for Wordsworth had to be that of the people
actually concerned with the experiences of life
the simple prose-like language of peasants
style had to be simple so that poetry could be read and understood by everyone easily. 

17. Was Wordsworth a revolutionary poet?
Here are some ideas that made him revolutionary:
The origin of poetry derives from emotion and not from reason;
Poetry must deal with common people and common events ;
The language of poetry must be the one spoken by peasants, even if
purified from its defects;
A more democratic concept of poetry , addressed to a larger audience;
A new conception of nature, with which a closer contact is necessary;
The poet as a teacher of everlasting truths
Revaluation of children ;
Importance given to personal memories and experiences ;
Imagination is superior to reason.

18. He’s got a bee in his bonnet!
Recollection in tranquillity
nature
child
Rustic life
Simple language
He’s got a bee in his bonnet!

19. Ready for some questions?
chose events and situations from common life
The author's aim was to___________________________________________ 1
interesting through a certain colouring of imagination
and to make them________________________________________________
low and rustic life with its elementary feelings
The subject of poetry is_________________________________________ 2
that commonly used by men
purified
though_________
The language of poetry is_________________________ 3
its defects
from___________
sensibility and enthusiasm,
Compared with common men, the poet has greater______________________
____________________________________ 4
and a greater knowledge of human nature
the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings 5
Poetry is__________________________________________
emotion recollected in tranquillity
Poetry originates from______________________________ 6

20. Thank you

21. Pantheism is the doctrine according to which all the souls of human beings are temporarily separated fragments from the totality of Creation with which they will be reunited in the end. Wordsworth sees nature as something that includes both inanimate and human nature, each is part of the same whole.

22. Wordsworth, like Rousseau, believed that in an urban environment, under the pressures of work and alienated from nature as well as his roots, man had lost contact with his innermost soul and was no longer able to appreciate the simplest joys of life and to capture the beauty of things. A product of evil - the Industrial Revolution -was there to bear witness of man's tendency to the destruction of beauty. In contrast, people who spend a lot of time in nature, such as labourers and farmers, retain the purity and nobility of their souls.

23. Sensations give birth to simple thoughts and the latter combining together give birth to complex ideas. As a consequence the character of the sensations received determines the quality of a man's ideas. Therefore a man who receives his sensations from nature, which is good and nearer to the divine, is bound to think in a more elevated and moral way.

24. Wordsworth worked out a theory of poetry of his own, expounded in his long Preface which can be considered the Manifesto of English Romanticism

25. In one of his letters, he wrote "Every great poet is a teacher: I wish either to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing". In another one he explained that "There is scarcely one of my poems which does not aim to direct the attention to some moral sentiment, or to some general principle, or law of thought, or of our intellectual constitution".

26. He realizes that even after he has died he will be able to live on in the memory of his family and friends, just as those who have passed on before him are in his memory. Wordsworth is especially heartened to know that his sister Dorothy, with whom he spent countless hours, will remember him fondly, carrying him with her wherever she goes.

27. If poetry originates from an emotion, it is not from the emotion directly, but from the recollection of that same emotion "in tranquillity", through the re-creative capacity of memory, that the emotion is reproduced in a purified and poetic form.

28. From the PREFACE to Lyrical ballads
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind”.
From the PREFACE to Lyrical ballads

29. Hartley wrote that no ideas are innate in man, but they all derive from the impression of external objects, and from their propagation through the nerves to the brain. For Hartley the three stages of the mind’s development correspond to the three ages of man:
Childhood (only sensations from the external world)
Youth ( sensation give raise to emotion and simple ideas)
Manhood ( simple ideas are organized into complex ones through rational thinking).
While for Hartley this was only a mechanical process, Wordsworth was convinced that we can also enrich simple impressions with the power of imagination giving rise to more complex ideas and emotions which become poetry if “recollected in tranquillity”

30. Nature is not a power external to man; we are part of it
Nature is not a power external to man; we are part of it. Our best feelings are inspired by nature and in nature we can discover moral and spiritual values.

31. With the advent of psychoanalysis and the general Freudian acceptance of the importance of childhood in the adult psyche, Wordsworth’s understanding of the human mind seems simple enough today. But in Wordsworth’s time, in what Seamus Heaney has called “Dr. Johnson’s supremely adult eighteenth century,” it was shockingly unlike anything that had been proposed before.

32. The simplicity of its language and the subject matter came as a shock to the public, used to the refined neoclassical poetry