William Wordsworth

Wordsworth and Coleridge effectively recollect the atmosphere around a memory in their poems ‘Lines Written A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ and ‘Frost at Midnight.’ I plan to discuss the similar and divergent ways in which both poets accomplish this, looking at form, content and context. Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey has been described as a tourist poem in which the centre of attraction, the famous ruined abbey is out of sight a few miles downstream. …

…focuses more on the reader’s ability to connect with the poet’s emotions. Nor wilt thou then forget That, after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake. (Tintern Abbey ll. 156-60) Bibliography ‘Lyrical Ballads’. In Duncan Wu (ed.) Romanticism – An Anthology Cambridge, Mass, 1973. Stephen Maxfield Parrish, The Art of the Lyrical Ballads