William Wordsworth

“And as I mounted up the hillThe music in my heart I bore,

Long after it was heard no more.”[The Solitary Reaper]

Memory & Inspiration

“Lyrical Ballads”“Preface”

It is considered the manifesto of the Romantic poetry because defines a new type of poetry:

• “language really used by men” to be appreciated by a wider audience

• Poet as a prophet: “endued with more lively sensibility […]and a more comprehensible soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind”

• Imagination of the poet can “colour” the objects observed, that is presents them in an unusual aspect

• Task of the memory “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. It is not the original emotion, but past feelings contemplated and reorganized.

Memory: Wordsworth Vs. Leopardi“I have said that poetry is the spontaneous

overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin fromemotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins...”(From Preface to Lyrical Ballads, W. Wordsworth, 1802.)

“La sensazione presente non deriva immediatamente dalle cose, non è un'immagine degli oggetti, ma della immagine fanciullesca; unaricordanza, una ripetizione, una ripercussione o riflesso della immagine antica [...] Un oggetto qualunque, per esempio un luogo, un sito, una campagna, per bella che sia, se non desta alcuna rimembranza) non è poetica punto a vederla. La medesima, ed anche un sito, un oggetto qualunque, affatto impoetico in se, sarà, poeticissimo a rimembrarlo. La rimembranza è essenziale e principalenel sentimento poetico, non per altro se non perché il presente, qual ch'egli sia, non può essere poetico.'(From Zibaldone di Pensieri, G. Leopardi, 1817.)

“We are seven”• "We Are Seven" was written in 1798, when

Wordsworth was only 18 years old. • The poem is composed of sixteen four-line stanzas,

and ends with one five-line stanza. Each stanza has an abab rhyming pattern.

• The poem is an interesting conversation between a man and a young girl.

• The speaker begins the poem with the question of what a child should know of death.

• She seems almost to be in denial about the deaths of her siblings, especially because she continues to spend time with them and sing to them.

• She refuses to become incapacitated by grief, or to cast the deceased out of her life.

“My heart leaps up”My heart leaps up when I

behold A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural

piety.

“Daffodils”• This poem was inspired by a

walk with his sister, and by what she wrote about this walk.

• Composition and contents

• Importance of memory and imagination in this writing