Wordsworth and Nature

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the poet's writing styles and shows how we are so accustomed to thinking of 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.

From the Paper:

"While Wordsworth will always be known for the clarity and undiluted Romanticism of "Tintern Abbey", to assume that his stance vis--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."

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