Sunday, October 13, 2013

Relate "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" to Wordworth's idea of poetry ("spontaneous overflow" and "emotional tranquility").

One of the more famous poems in the canon of Romantic
literature, William Wordsworth composed "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" in 1804. The
lyric poem of four stanzas captures a moment two years before when Wordsworth and his
sister, Dorothy, strolling near a lake in Cumbria County, happened across a field of
daffodils hugging the shore. Two years before this experience, Wordsworth (along with
Samuel Taylor Coleridge) in his preface to the second edition of
Lyrical Ballads, offered his definition of poetry - what became the
motto of Romantic poetry in general: " Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility". It is the fourth
stanza of the poem which clearly reifies this definition. Unlike Plato who believed that
poets composed immediately after inspiration, Wordsworth believed that a lengthy period
of reflection - "emotion recollected in tranquility - did (and
should) follow the first inrush of the muse. In the Lyrical
Ballads the poet continues:


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For our continued influxes of feeling are
modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our
past feelings; and as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to
each other, we discover what is really important to men … (Brett and Jones
246)



It is this indispensable
link between inspiration and anamnesis - "the inward eye" of the fourth stanza - which
constitutes the heart of Wordsworth's view of poetry, and which for both poet and reader
add depth of meaning and truth to the recollected experience.

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