"Tintern Abbey" and Llyswen Farm

1977 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-82
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Little
Keyword(s):  
Romanticism ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fairer
Keyword(s):  

XVII-XVIII ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-89
Author(s):  
François-Marie Piquet
Keyword(s):  

2002 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-84
Author(s):  
Deborah Kennedy
Keyword(s):  

2011 ◽  
Vol 63 (260) ◽  
pp. 444-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. B. Lake
Keyword(s):  

1995 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Vander Weele

Modern critics have been suspicious of the "abundant recompense" that "Tintern Abbey" claims for the replacement of youthful joys by mature thought. Many have contrasted unconscious motivation and surface articulation within the poem. But what if Wordsworth was more self-conscious about the efficacy of memory than we give him credit for? I argue that both the language and the structure of the poem show Wordsworth questioning the claims he was making for memory. But were there resources available for him to understand memory differently than we do-as well as to call that understanding into question? I argue that there were, and that they can be found both in texts echoed in the poem and in a long tradition of reflection on memory recently described by Mary Carruthers in The Book of Memory (1990). Where critics such as Harold Bloom have seen a blind spot in Wordswoth's self-consciousness and have brought psychoanalytic theory to bear upon their analysis of memory, I argue that Wordsworth's categories for understanding and questioning memory were at least as historical and ethical as they were psychological and aesthetic. Seeing the author work out of and question a tradition of memory as ethical construction helps us understand what is at stake in the poem. Less productive is the assumption that only the poem's readers can figures the riven text below its smooth surfaces.


2007 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 51-60
Author(s):  
Sandro Jung

Despite the claims for simplicity of language that Wordsworth articulated in the early years of his literary career, especially in the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads-his pronounced difference from earlier (Neoclassical) poets, poetic practice, and the forms of poetry of the Augustans-he could not escape what Waiter Jackson Bate long ago termed the "burden of the past". Wordsworth's indebtedness to his literary forbears is not only ideational but formal as well. The present article aims to examine Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and relate it to the tradition of the hymnal ode used so masterfully by William Collins in the mid-century, at the same time reconsidering the generic conceptualisation of the poem as an ode in all but name which in its structure and essence re-evokes mid-century hymnal odes but which is contextualised within Wordsworth's notion of emotional immediacy and simplicity.


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