Wordsworth as a Romantic Poet

William Wordsworth was the representative tine poet of the Romantic Revival which was a literary movement in art and literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was the pioneer in bringing about transition from Neo-classicism to Romanticism in English poetry. To him strong feeling, imagination and love of nature were more important than reason, order and intellectual ideas.

Wordsworth’s poetry is subjective. It is the spontaneous expression of his own feelings, ideas, and emotion. For examples, ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘The Daffodils’ tell of his personal experiences and feelings that he had in different stages of his life.

Like other romantics Wordsworth believes that the power of poetry is strongest when the creative impulse is spontaneous. In this creative process imagination plays a very important role. Wordsworth’s imaginative faculty is so powerful that through imagination he can have a glimpse of the Eternity; Wordsworth gives ‘importance to subject matter rather than style. He always chooses simple and ordinary things as the subject matter of his poetry. He adds charm of novelty to the common things of life and Nature by the coloring of his imagination and thus makes them appear super-natural. He threw away the gaudiness and inane phraseology of the 18th century poetry and made the language of his poems more real and more natural than it was in the Neo-classic Age.

Wordsworth’s approach to Nature is mystical. He believes that the Spirit of God pervades the entire Universe, both animate and inanimate. He adds dignity to the worship of Nature and gives a color of romance and glory to the simple lives of countrymen living in the midst of Nature’s beautiful surroundings. He believes that there is a strong bond between Man and Nature, because in both of them dwells the Spirit of the Eternal Being.