William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Lyrical Ballads
Things to Consider:
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French Revolution and English counterrevolutionary measures
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Industrial Revolution and its Consequences
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Use of Language
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Choice of Subject
Discussion Questions:
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802):
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What is a ballad
?
408:
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What does Wordsworth mean by "the real language of men" (408)?
409:
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Why has he selected scenes from "low and rustic life" as his subject?
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Explain: "In that condition the passions of men are incorporated
with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature" (409).
410:
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Explain: "From their rank in society and the sameness and narrow
circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity
they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions"
(410).
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How is their language "more permanent" and "far more philosophical"
than that conventionally used by poets?
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Explain: "All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings" (410).
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What is a man "possessed of more than usual organic sensibility" (410)?
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Explain: "Our thoughts . . . are indeed the representations of
our past feelings" (410).
411:
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Explain: "The feeling therein developed gives importance to the
action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling" (411).
411-12:
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Why, according to Wordsworth, has he sought to avoid the following devices?
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personification of abstract ideas
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poetic diction
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falsehood of description
412:
413:
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Explain: "There neither is, nor can be, any essential difference
between the language of prose and metrical composition" (413).
414:
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What, according to Wordsworth, is a Poet?
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If the language of real men is the absolute standard, why would a Poet
need to modify it, as Wordsworth suggests?
415:
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What one restriction, according to Wordsworth, does the Poet face?
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Explain: "We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure"
(415).
416:
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Explain: "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge"
(416).
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Explain: "The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the
vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and
over all time" (416).
417:
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Explain what Wordsworth says about differences in "kind" and in "degree"
(417).
417-18:
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Why, according to Wordsworth should the Poet write in meter?
418:
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What exactly is "emotion recollected in tranquility" (418)?
419:
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Why will "painful feeling . . . always be found intermingled with powerful
descriptions of the deeper passions" (419)?
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Explain: "My language may frequently have suffered from those
arbitrary connections of feelings and ideas with particular words and phrases,
from which no man can altogether protect himself" (419).
420:
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Explain: "We not only wish to be pleased, but to be pleased in
that particular way in which we have been accustomed to be pleased" (420).
"There Was a Boy"
421:
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Explain lines 1-2. What literary technique is being employed here?
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How is such use significant to the overall theme of the poem?
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What are "mimic hootings" (10)? Who is mimicking whom? Explain.
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Explain the final three lines.
"Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern
Abbey"
404:
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What are the "principal requirements" of an ode?
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What is the origin of the "wreathes of smoke" Wordsworth describes (18)?
405:
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Explain lines 24-31.
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What does it mean to become a "living soul" (47)?
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What does it mean to "see into the life of things" (50)?
406:
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Explain: "In this moment there is life and food / For future years"
(65-66).
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Explain: "More like a man / Flying from something he dreads, than
one / Who sought the thing he loved" (71-73).
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Explain: "The sounding cataract / Haunted me like a passion" (77-78).
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Explain lines 79-84.
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Why are all the "aching joys" (85) of the past all gone?
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Explain lines 89-94.
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Explain lines 94-103.
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What is "the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
/ And what perceive" (106-8)?
407:
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Explain: "In thy voice I catch / The language of my former heart"
(117-18).
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Explain: "Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her"
(123-24).
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What future does Wordsworth foresee for his sister and her appreciation
of nature? How does this relate back to him?
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
527:
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Explain: "I was often unable to think of external things as having
external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not
apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature" (527).
528:
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Describe the rhyme scheme.
529:
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What does “Trailing clouds of glory” (64) refer to?
530:
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What are “Shades of the prison-house” (67)?
531:
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What are “obstinate questionings/ Of sense and outward things” (141-42)?
533:
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What are “Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears” (203)"?
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cf. Romans 8.26 (RSV):
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“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how
to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs
too deep for words.”
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(KJV): Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know
not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession
for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
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