William Wordsworth As the Quintessential Romantic Poet Term Paper

William Wordsworth as the quintessential Romantic poet - a man in love with the idea of a simple life lived close to nature - that we are apt to overlook the fact that his relationship with nature is in fact a somewhat ambivalent one, or at least a complex one. While Wordsworth will always be known for the clarity and undiluted Romanticism of "Tintern Abbey," to assume that his stance vis-a-vis nature in this poem constitutes an adequate description of all of his connections to and understandings of the external world does him a disservice. To do so would be to equate his passion for the natural world and the necessity of direct human connection to nature for a simple-minded sort of tendency to ramble on about beauty. Rather, if we look beyond "Tintern Abbey" to the whole body of his work, we came to a fuller understanding of the ways in which he embraced the human as well as the natural world around him. "St. Paul's," a poem that Wordsworth penned in 1808 but never published, is an excellent instrument to use through which to discover the complex worldview of this poet.

It may be argued that Wordsworth's ever-shifting, ever becoming more refined ideas about his own place in the world (and the meaning of human life lived in the world) reflected continual changes in his understanding of his calling as one particular kind of poet as opposed to another. The poet who speaks to us of such bliss in finding his soul wedded to the natural world in his early poems, who shakes off the constraints of classical meter and rhyme altogether in his 18th-century poems comes at the end of his life to a different sense of his place in the universe and in doing so also transforms the voice in which he speaks. For his vision of his relationship to the world beyond his own experiences is throughout his life a shaping element of his poetic voice, and as this vision changes so does his style (Lucas 1975).We will in fact see that by the end of his life, by the middle of the 19th century, that Wordsworth is a man humbled before the expansiveness of the human mind, of the power of imagination. "The Prelude," which Wordsworth added to over a number of years and which is clearly in fundamental ways (even if not in all of the particulars) autobiographical in fact serves as a far better keystone for understanding Wordsworth's work as a whole than does a poem like "Tintern Abbey" or even "St. Paul's" - although reading "St. Paul's" in the context of "The Prelude" provides insights both into the earlier poem and in to Wordsworth's understanding (at least in 1808) of the relationship between city and country, between God and imagination. The importance of these elements is impossible to dismiss in a poem like "The Prelude," in which Wordsworth writes (in Book 14)

This spiritual Love acts not nor can it exist

Without Imagination, which, in truth,

Is but another name for absolute power

And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,

And Reason in her most exalted mod.

While there are certainly moments of Christian orthodoxy in "The Prelude," and glimpses of Wordsworth as the worshipper of nature, this poem is finally a celebration not of a Romantic ideal of a religion of nature but of "the mind of man." Wordsworth has learned that he is worthy himself, that he is sufficient unto himself in a way that was not possible when he was younger. Needing neither God nor Nature to support him, he comes in the end to a greater appreciation of both of these as well as of himself. We can see "St. Paul's as serving in many ways as an introduction to these issues. Perhaps Wordsworth felt that at this time they were still too insufficiently developed to be published (Hill 1989).

The mode of both "St. Paul's" and "The Prelude" poem seems to be….....