Language Of Wordsworth And Coleridge

Thomas Owens explores exultant visions inspired by Wordsworth's and Coleridge's scrutiny of the night sky, the natural world, and the domains of science. He examines a set of scientific patterns which the poets used to express ideas about poetry, religion, criticism, and philosophy, and sets out the importance of analogy in their creative thinking.

This is a discussion of the ballads of Coleridge and Wordsworth, notably those which appear in the work Lyrical Ballads (1798) which contains 4 poems by Coleridge and 19 by Wordsworth. This present volume assesses and contrasts their likenesses, their individual excellences and sometimes their weaknesses.

In her study of two creative minds, Lucy Newlyn offers a startlingly new version of the poetic interaction between Coleridge and Wordsworth during the critical years from 1797 to 1807. Rejecting the traditional accounts, even those given by the poets themselves, which have minimized the differences between the two, Newlyn demonstrates that it is only on the most superficial level that each poet seemed to be the other's ideal audience. Below that surface, she insists, there were radical dissimilarities between the two which led to a kind of "creative" misunderstanding by which each artist clearly defined himself in relation to the other. Because it is in the poet's "private language" of allusion that these differences are most clearly seen, the book concludes that this "private language" spoken by artists amongst themselves may in fact be the most aggressive of literary forms.

Thomas Owens explores some of the exultant visions inspired by Wordsworth's and Coleridge's close scrutiny of the night sky, the natural world, and the domains of science. He examines a set of scientific patterns drawn from natural, geometric, celestial, and astronomical sources which Wordsworth and Coleridge used to express their ideas about poetry, religion, literary criticism, and philosophy, and establishes the central importance of analogy in their creative thinking. Analogies prompted the poets' imaginings in geometry and cartography, in nature (representations of the moon) and natural history (studies of spider-webs, streams, and dew), in calculus and conical refraction, and in the discovery of infra-red and ultraviolet light. Although this is primarily a study of the patterns which inspired their writing, the findings overturn the prevalent critical consensus that Wordsworth and Coleridge did not have the access, interest, or capacity to understand the latest developments in nineteenth-century astronomy and mathematics, which they did in fact possess. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 'the language of the heavens' reinstates many relationships which the poets had with scientists and their sources. Most significantly, the book illustrates that these sources are not simply another context or historical lens through which to engage with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's work but are instead a controlling device of the symbolic imagination. Exploring the structures behind Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poems and metaphysics stakes out a return to the evidence of the Romantic imagination, not for its own sake, but in order to reveal that their analogical configuration of the world provided them with a scaffold for thinking, an intellectual orrery which ordered artistic consciousness and which they never abandoned.

This carefully edited collection has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Lyrical Ballads, two collections of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but they became and remain a landmark, changing the course of English literature and poetry. Most of the poems in the 1798 edition were written by Wordsworth, with Coleridge contributing only five poems to the collection, including one of his most famous works, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". A second edition was published in 1800, in which Wordsworth included additional poems and a preface detailing the pair's avowed poetical principles. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. William Wordsworth (1770 -1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798). Table of Contents: Anima Poetae (By Samuel Taylor Coleridge) Essays, Letters, and Notes about the Principles of Poetry (By William Wordsworth) LYRICAL BALLADS, WITH A FEW OTHER POEMS (1798) LYRICAL BALLADS, WITH OTHER POEMS (1800)

Lyrical Ballads have always been wedded to controversy. Though the judgments of the periodicals and the ensuing authorial reaction have long since been superseded by a plethora of scholarly interpretations, the debate still focuses on their elusive, paradoxical character. Are the poems traditional or experimental, a random collocation or an organised sequence? Patrick Campbell surveys the critical fluctuations of nearly two centuries while privileging recent approaches which have sought fresh perspectives on the volume - contextual, formalist and genre based, psycho-analytic, materialist, maverick.