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Aufsatz
Literaturwissenschaft

Reichsuniversität Groningen

2016

Michaela R. ©
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ESSAY


The Poetic Self and How Wordsworth Made Use of this Prominent Theme in His Works, including The Prelude

The Romantic Movement (1780-1832) was a rather international artistic and philosophical movement, which changed peoples’ picture of themselves and the world around them. During the “Age of Revolution” a major transformation in not only poetry’s theory and practice but also how the world was perceived took place.

The imagination was presented as the natural equivalent of humans’ creative power, being dynamic, active, and the power to constitute reality. For Wordsworth, we “half-create” and “half-perceive” the world around us. Even greater emphasis was put on the importance of instincts, intuition, and emotions.

Applied to the creation of poetry it was made evident that poetry was used as a mirror of the interior world of the author. The “poet speaker” became less a “persona” and more of a direct person and this highlighted the development of a self. This development became a major theme and can be seen in several of Wordsworth’s works, including The 1805 Prelude.

Self-awareness was less viewed as vanity but rather something like a journey during which a universe of knowledge was to be unlocked.
Wordsworth developed this self initially in his “literary symbiosis” with Coleridge. The two authors collaborated on several works, resulting in them publishing the Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems, in 1798. This symbiosis was somewhere paradox at the time as the ideas of Romanticism depicted this exchange of thoughts as an “act[s] of parasitism” (Galperin 514).

It “is predicated on ideals of originality and autonomy that criticism, more than romantic writing itself, has advanced in response to constructions of the self which are either representations of something else or worse” but in this case this parasitism is undoubtedly mutual.

The two poets influenced each other but both stayed autonomous individual beings in their dependency. This dependency made the individual “self invulnerable amid its vulnerability” (Galperin 514) as it had its specific function in their collaborative relationship.

Both poets tried by collaborating to clearly distinguish themselves, the self from the other self, in a way that the individuality would be made apparent. This joint literary work changed not only their persons but also their distinctive poetic selves, both being influential on the other.

Wordsworth moved from his focus on “nature to the individual mind” (Galperin 513) and Coleridge went the opposite way further approaching nature.
Authors like Wordsworth tried to understand the mind and therefore constituted a self to get to know their identity. Only one example is his
The Prelude in which he focuses, especially in Book I and II, on how his experiences of nature impact his poetic self.

He reveals himself sometimes to be “Two consciousnesses – conscious of myself, / And of some other being” (Greenblatt 371) which shows that Wordsworth is very aware of not only his present self but also has a good understanding of his past self. “He let nothing go” (Gill 533), not of any thought or experience but uses it for his literature.

By doing so he even shows struggles he might have had with an earlier poetic self and transforms this into something completely new. Wordsworth himself said that all great poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity” (Greenblatt 303) and this recollection not only changes his provisional words but also his past self.
Modern readers can study what contemporaries could not, the development and change in the poet’s mind and his self.

By being one of the most autobiographical poets at that time, Wordsworth’s moods, his steps and his growth could not only be traced through his poems he published but also through what he did not publish. His self-presentation through his poems is something rather paradox as Wordsworth is more of a private person, yet very willing to self-exhibit himself.

Maybe inaccessible to his contemporaries and the wider mass of his readers at the time (in contrary to modern days) the poet himself was aware of his change by reconsidering previous published and unpublished works. He did not necessarily produce his works in sequels but like e.g. his Sonnets of 1838 one could find confirmation of serenity in the later ones, not making sense without the previous ones.

He even wrote a sequel of a sequel (in his Yarrow poems) to “incorporate in his rendering of loss a final statement about partial recovery and consolation” (Gill 546) to give the poem its poignancy and make evident the “changefulness of life” (Gill 548).

Many historical events (the disillusionment of the French Revolution) and friends, especially his contemporary Coleridge, inspired William Wordsworth to give voice to his experiences in his works which eventually turned into some of his best works.

Absorbing literally everything helped him on his journey of self-awareness.

Works cited list:

Wordsworth, William. “The 1805 Prelude.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2012. 349-402. Print.
Galperin, William H “"Desynonymizing" the Self in Wordsworth and Coleridge”. Studies in Romanticism 26.4 (1987): 513–526. Web. 16 February 2016. <>.

Gill, Stephen. “"Affinities Preserved": Poetic Self-reference in Wordsworth”. Studies in Romanticism 24.4 (1985): 531–549. Web. 16 February 2016. <>.



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