Harmony

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH -HARMONY BETWEEN MAN AND NATURE-

The critics normally divide the Romantic poets into two generations; the first is the one of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, while the second includes George G. Byron, Percy B. Shelley and John Keats. The poets of the first generation are called “Lake Poets” because they both lived in the Lake District, a picturesque region that was one of the main sources of inspiration for their poems. Another source of inspiration was the French Revolution, with its ideals and principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, which led the poets to convey freedom.

William Wordsworth was born in England in 1770. He was educated in Cambridge and after graduation he travelled to France where he developed a strong enthusiasm for the ideals of the French Revolution. Thereafter, he went back to England where he became a great friend of Coleridge and their influence on one another was very productive. In fact, in 1797, they planned the so-called “Lyrical Ballads”, a volume of poems which made its first appearance in 1798 (with four poems by Coleridge and nineteen by Wordsworth) and even today stands out as a landmark in English Literature. In particular, the Preface to the second edition (1800) contains the theoretical background, a new poetic theory which is considered the Manifesto of the English Romantic Poetry.

In the preface Wordsworth explains his own and Coleridge's ideas about poetry, its language and its subjects. More specifically, he defines poetry both as “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and “an emotion recollected in tranquility”, meaning that after the poet had a contact with nature, he goes home and, in tranquility, he remembers the emotions he felt while he was in communion with nature, and only afterwards he tries to write them down in order to make the readers feel the same way he did. According to Wordsworth's idea, the language used by poets should be “a selection of language really...