A Critical View of the Role of Nature in Wordsworth (67874)
The poetry of William Wordsworth has been seen from a variety of critical perspectives since his death in 1850. In 1817 Wordworth's contemporary and friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in his 'Biographica Literaria' that "Wordsworth stood nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own" (Hayden, 1994, xiv).
Wordsworth was "misunderstood and disliked by many, but gradually through the years he was given a place in English letters commensurate with his endowments and achievements" (Monarch Notes, 1/1/1963). The poet was well aware he was breaking new ground without a body of critical opinion to support him, and therefore felt the need throughout his life to justify and defend his poetic works.
The Romantic Movement to which Wordsworth gave voice represented a break with the more formal structures and traditions of English poetry that had preceded it, and like all radical innovations in the arts suffered its share of detractors, mockers, denouncers, and debunkers. Wordsworth included long notes about the sources, circumstances and location of composition, and meaning of many of his poems, presumably to make them more palatable to his readers. The notes with which he introduces We Are Seven, for example, are longer than the work itself. He describes his encounter with the "little cottage girl" whom he calls the "heroine" of the poem, then diverges into a long account of the contributions he made to Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (and those the latter made to We Are Seven), finally describing his inability to identify the girl on a visit to Goodrich Castle, the site of the poem, years later.
We Are Seven illustrates some of the innovations which distinguished him and his fellow Romantic poets from the English literature that had been written before them. First, there is the subject matter. His ...