It is associated with darkness and mystery.
(36)įor Burke, the sublime creates a sense of awe and terror. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. Burke, for instance, argued that beautiful objects provide pleasure, but that the sublime was caused by a feeling of terror: Starting with Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), eighteenth-century treatises on aesthetics distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime. In adding the second stanza, Wordsworth did something controversial: he turned the beautiful into the sublime. They make us think about the concept of infinity (“never-ending”), and turn the landscape into something that is too vast for the human mind to comprehend. These lines are more epic in scope, and relate the daffodils to the vastness of the universe. However, in 1815, Wordsworth added the second stanza, in which the speaker compares the daffodils to the stars in the Milky Way: The first version, published in 1807, described the beauty of the daffodils, as well as the poet’s resultant happiness. The poem’s publication history reveals that Wordsworth increasingly strove to express a sublime feeling. According to Wordsworth, the passionate observer sees with the imagination and feels from the heart. Not only are the flowers sublime, but so are the human faculties with which we process their beauty. While we might wish to defend Wordsworth based on our personal taste, the poem actually provides its own best defense.
Wordsworth’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge even complained about Wordsworth’s “mental bombast” (II, 136), although he did add that only a genius could provide such a lofty treatment of an unworthy subject.
Many of Wordsworth’s contemporaries found daffodils too trivial a subject for Wordsworth’s imaginative description (Butler 53). William Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is often described as a good example of the short Romantic lyric, despite the fact that its first readers were divided about the poem’s merit. “A Certain Colouring of Imagination”: Wordsworth’s Sublime Daffodils Please do not plagiarize this essay (your instructor can google too!), and note that although we have used MLA formatting, the spacing of paragraphs and Works Cited entries looks a little bit different online. A senior paper may be more detailed and complex. The essay provided here is the kind of research essay you might be expected to write in your first or second year of university.
William wordsworth i wandered lonely as a cloud analysis how to#
This lesson shows how to take some of what we’ve learned about our sample text (William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”) and turn it into an essay.
0 kommentar(er)
