Questions tagged [william-wordsworth]
Questions about the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) and his works. In addition to his own work, e.g. Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) and The Prelude (1850), he wrote the influential Lyrical Ballads (1798) in co-operation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
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Did Wordsworth read William Jones's translation of Kalidasa?
In Finding the Raga, Amit Chaudhuri writes:
Meghdut literally means 'cloud-messenger'. In Kalidasa's poem, a lover asks a cloud to carry with it a message from him to his loved one, who lives in the ...
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Where did Wordsworth describe Keats's poetry as "very pretty paganism"?
While researching a question about one of Wordsworth's sonnets, I came across the article In the Ruins of Babylon: The Poetic “Genius” of John Keats by Paul Krause, which contains the following ...
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"Chieftain" and Toussaint's ethnicity in Wordsworth's "To Toussaint L'Ouverture"
Wordsworth's "To Toussaint L'Ouverture" apostrophises the eponymous freedom fighter as "O miserable Chieftain!" (line 5). In "Black Heroes/White Writers: Toussaint L'Ouverture ...
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The text of Wordsworth's "To Toussaint L'Ouverture"
Several different versions of Wordsworth's sonnet "To Toussaint L'Ouverture" can be found online. Here is one version, from Haram Lee's blog on the Brandeis University website:
Toussaint, ...
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Meaning of "not to say this is a bad kind of poetry" etc. in Wordsworth's Preface to the "Lyrical Ballads"
At one point in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth quotes a parody of simple verses by Samuel Johnson and compares it with a stanza from the "Babes in the Wood". Then he ...
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What is the “presence” in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’?
In Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ he describes a “presence”:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated ...
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How can pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind?
“Lines Written in the Early Spring” is English Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s meditation on the harmony of nature and on humanity’s failure to follow nature’s peaceful example.
However, in the ...
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What does “inward eye” mean?
William Wordsworth’s poem "The Daffodils" contains the following lines:
For oft, when on my couch I lie,
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
which is bliss of ...
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Looking for a famous quote by William Wordsworth probably relevant to the concept of the Anthropocene
I've talked to someone who studied English literature and the concept of Anthropocene recently, and the person quoted Wordsworth during our conversation. Unfortunately I can not remember the quote, ...
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What does Wordsworth mean by "A pagan suckled in a creed outworn"?
I have two questions regarding this sonnet by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we ...
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Is it valid to say "Boat Stealing" by Wordsworth has a sense of foreboding in the section up to line 25?
I have recently annotated "Boat Stealing" (page 20 of this PDF) and when looking online, I have found that my interpretation of the poem in some aspects is a bit different to most others. I ...
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Theme of William Wordsworth's poem "We Are Seven"?
"We Are Seven" is a poem by William Wordsworth and this poem depicts the innocent nature of a child who just does not want to understand that her siblings have passed away of natural causes and ...
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“Returning Traveller” Trope
In the poem “The Ruined Cottage” by William Wordsworth, the narrator listens to an old man sitting outside of an abandoned cottage tell of the family that used to live therein. The man describes how ...
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What's the meaning of "my censures" as in Coleridge's “Biographia Literaria”
In Chapter Four:
This fact of itself would have made me diffident in my censures, had not a still stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of the heat and long continuance of the ...
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How does the editor know that seven lines are missing from Wordsworth's Home at Grasmere?
The Wordsworth edition The Major Works, edited by Stephen Gill and published by Oxford University Press in 1984 (and revised later) was the first
selection of Wordsworth's work (...) in which the ...