Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey By William Wordsworth E

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth William Wordsworth is commonly regarded as the vanguard poet of the Romantic movement in British literature. The son of a wealthy Cumberland attorney, his birth followed the dawn of the English Industrial Revolution. Afforded an education not uncommon of the British bourgeoisie, Wordsworth attended St. Johns College, Cambridge, studying literature and rhetoric, prior to the advent of the French Revolution. Having fallen prey to his keen interest in the excitement of French revolutionary ideology, Wordsworth spent the next several years in France with his lover, Annette Vallon. He was heavily influenced by the works of the French revolutionaries and was impressed with an intense desire to bring similar power and fervor to his own work. A pioneer of free verse, Wordsworth sought to cast off all literary convention, expressing often controversial political and religious opinions through his simply-written poetry and prose. Wordsworths Lyrical Ballads became the consummate expression of the authors vibrant and effulgent new style. Wordsworths most famous poem, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey was included as the last item in his collection of Lyrical Ballads. The poem expresses the authors nearly pantheistic love of nature and his longing for humanitys eventual reunification with the natural world. As Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey opens, we are met the narrator, standing pensively on the Banks of the Wye river, revisited after five years absence. He is lost in the bitter-sweet recollection of the bygone days of his youth, spent frolicking along its shores. He describes a sacred place, a refuge from the storms of the outside world. He speaks almost reverently of the scenes magnanimity and the thought of introspection that it inspires, explaining, . . .Once again/ Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,/That on a wild secluded scene impress/ Thoughts of more deep seclusion (552, l. 5-8). Wordsworths veneration of nature was typical of the Romantic lyricists, who often practiced forms of pantheism and mysticism, seeking transcendence through natural awareness. Early in the poem, the author focus resides upon the physical and aethetic pleasures that surround. He is seduced by the beauteous, lush, green forms that beset him.