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William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge can be seen as two of the great poets and important figures of the romantic period. The genre of poetry reveals and interprets our hidden emotions and can also be seen to call attention to many aspects of life that may be overlooked. This is definitely the case for romantic poetry, with writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge using intense and imaginative language to explore human emotion through rejecting the realities of the late 18th century and focusing on the natural world. Throughout this essay I will provide a close analysis of Wordsworth’s ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’ and Coleridge’s ‘The Eolian Harp’, showing how both writers express the ideas of the Romantic period through recognizing and expressing the importance of individual experience.
One of the dominant characteristics of Romantic poetry is the strong interest in the natural landscape. Driver comments that ‘the romantics actively interact with nature; they have
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The Eolian Harp in the poem can be seen as a metaphor – ‘the harp comes to represent the natural world in general, and the breeze that brings it to life if the spirit of God’(16 hipwell). Hipwell states that in most of Coleridge’s poems ‘the natural scenery that he experiences suggests to the poet some wider truth about his own life’(14). Throughout the entire poem, he uses visual imagery to paint his experience of London in the morning. Meter is also used to direct the readers attention to particular words to emphasize meaning. Through imaginative thought you are able to engage in and respond to the visionary experiences that nature provides. Although Wordsworth tries to reconcile city with nature, I feel that nature still comes first in Wordsworth’s eyes, as the beauty of the city is only temporary, for once the people wake up, the city will wear a new garment. Poems were written on his flowers and trees…and on the nightly sky where men may see the unimpaired perfection of creation’(essay). This poem, however, shows that Wordsworth has created a way to love the city – by observing it when ‘the all mighty heart is lying still!’
Benard Groom stated that Wordsworth’s poetry was a ‘growing intimacy with earth, air and sky and with the plants and the animal life. His most exalted experiences and his periods of deepest insight were deeply connected with them’(89 Havens).
David Ferry commented that ‘The city is a collection of men and all their ordinary experiences, their common loves and attachments’. Coleridge is using the natural environment as a symbol for human qualities and emotion. Many lines in the poem end with masculine rhyme – rhyme that end on a stress, for example, bare, air, hill, will, still.
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