A230A Essay Questions and Detailed Answers: for Wordworth, Hoffman and Shelley. PDF

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Essays with Questions on Wordworth and Shelley and Hoffman! color-coded for visual learners, essays divided to points but can be fully memorized as they are....

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WORDWORTH Wordwoth’s poem “the daffodils” concentrates on the solitary and imaginative experience of the poet with natural landscape which results in a permenant spiritual benefit to the poet’s inner life. Discuss the romantic elements in the poem and how it condenses the “wordworthian”. Romanticism is a literary movement that was concerned with the self and the powers of the imagination. This period saw revolutionary forms of writing focusing on the exploration of the self and the unrealistic. The poem “The Daffodils: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807. It is considered his most famous poem. The poem celebrates the beauty of nature to such an extent that, for the poet, it is not only a beauty but “bliss of solitude” too. It is for him a source of inspiration* to live his life meaningful. The poem is a romantic poem that is based on the principle that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CLOSE READING ASPECTS: An ‘I’ voice in the poem is eventually identified as the poet. Its language and sentence structure are simple and direct. It is a lyric poem, that is a short poem devoted to expressing a single mood or moment of consciousness, usually personal where you have the poet as speaker. The poem's argument is built on three stages and, therefore, in three stanzas:   

The first describes the experience of seeing the daffodils, the second describes the poet’s immediate reaction to them, and the third describes the memory of this experience and its effect on the poet’s creativity.

From this, we can conclude that the poem describes how experiences of natural beauty can enter, work within and benefit the individual minds. The clarity and compactness of the language add to the poem’s claim that his experience is pure and simple, it touched the poet deeply, and it continues to revive itself within his consciousness or feelings. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BIOGRAPHICAL READING ASPECTS:

Summary by Kholoud Al-Ejily

A biographical reading identifies ‘I’ as Wordsworth and the lake as Ullswater lake and dates the experience to 1802 and the writing of the poem at least two years later (according to Dorothy Wordsworth's journal), composed between 1804-1807 at Dave Cottage and published in a collection entitled 'Poems in Two Volumes', 1807. This biographical reading gives the poem a cultural power because it attributes it to an important poet. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The fame of the daffodils gives us a glimpse of what Worsworthian means; -

the ‘Wordsworthian’ may be summed up as the concentration upon the poet’s solitary, an imaginatively intense experience within a natural landscape which results in profound and permanent spiritual benefit to the poet’s inner life.

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It is apparently autobiographical, the poem functions as a philosophical and general statement of the value of recollecting natural landscape within urban modernity.

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The landscape comes to dramatize the Romantic poet’s inner life, and by extension, arguably, everyone’s inner life.

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The therapeutic relationship between the poet and nature (human and landscape) has taught modern urban man to recollect natural beauty.

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This link between the Romantic poet’s self and the landscape has led to raising trust funds to preserve Lake District in general and Dove cottage in particular.

This sense of the poet as ‘lonely as a cloud’, disconnected, alone, self-absorbed, is very much the dominant version of the Wordsworthian within the popular cultural imagination -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To summarize, ‘The Daffodils’ is a poem conveying the beauty and simplicity of life, praising its simple pleasures which is a feature of Romantic poetry.

Summary by Kholoud Al-Ejily

William Wordworth is a poet of the landscape. His narrative poem “the brothers”, addresses the anxieties of return and homecoming to a specific local landscape after a long absence. Discuss how the poem dramatizes homecoming, how does this poem shed light on Wordworth’s own homecoming anxieties? Romanticism is a literary movement that was concerned with the self and the powers of the imagination. This period saw revolutionary forms of writing focusing on the exploration of the self and the unrealistic. William Wordworth is considered the father of Romanticism. “The Brothers” is an epic poetry. A long narrative in the form of a verse dialogue between a priest and a stranger, in which the priest tells the story of a local tragedy. The theme of homecoming is explored through the brother who comes home to his village after many years and is misrecognized and treated as a stranger. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------After 12 years, the returning brother, Leonard, is not recognized in his home village. Instead, he is misrecognized by the priest as a stranger, as a tourist, idle and well heeled, with nothing better to do than drive through the district. The poem draws a strong contrast between the priest sitting securely at home, with his wife, family, and domestic work around him, and the wandering Leonard, homesick, solitary, and returning with the intention of resuming a shepherd’s life and being reunited with his only brother. Leonard’s problem is that in many ways he is a stranger. He finds it hard to recognize the place itself; he is no longer up to date with the ‘history’ of the place. Leonard’s homecoming is a dream both of his own and of the locals.

However, this dream is destroyed by the story he is told by the priest concerning the fate of his brother, who dies sleepwalking in search of him. Leonard is not Wordsworth, nor is he his poetic persona. Yet this poem can be read as an expression of Wordsworth's anxieties about the possibility of making a home in Grasmere, and whether it is possible for wanderers to finally find home one day. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------In summary, ‘The Brothers’ is a poem by Wordwoth that explores the theme of homecoming and reflects the poet’s anxiety towards finding home and his stranger status through the character of Leonard.

Summary by Kholoud Al-Ejily

When writing his poem, ‘the daffodils’, Wordworth was inspired by the journal entry written by Dorothy relating the same experience. Discuss how the two accounts tally & differ in terms of expressing the Romantic experience and in terms of the genres used. -the same intro on Romanticism hereTo read this poem in its biographical context, one must examine Dorothy’s journal and compare it with Wordworth’s poem in terms of how each one of them described the same experience of seeing a mass of Daffodils growing along the lake. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some similarities: Both accounts clearly refer to the same experience of seeing a mass of daffodils growing along the margins of a lake under the trees and being blown about by high wind. IN ADDITION, share some of the ways of describing the experience, especially the tendency to use Personification, that is to think of the daffodils as behaving like people in describing them as ‘dancing’ and ‘gay’. It is important to keep in mind while comparing the two works that they are both crafted writing, even if the poem seems to be more crafted than the journal. Although it is tempting to think of Dorothy’s journal as merely the source material for the poem, there is plenty of evidence to show that even though the journal was written hastily and whenever time served, Dorothy consciously revised her writing for maximum effect. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Dorothy's account is in prose, a journal that has the sequence of events that happened with everyday details, for the purpose of maintaining a record for oneself, or, in Dorothy’s case, explicitly to please her brother. The journal is full of everyday details, these details include where they were walking, whom did they meet and what they ate and drank. This is an essentially private form of writing, and was never designed to be published. Dorothy’s account uses simple narration with details. She uses ‘we’ and then moves to ‘I’ when she speaks about herself “I never saw Daffodils so beautiful”; “I was very kindly treated by the Landlady”. The description of the daffodils in Dorothy’s journal starts as botanical: ‘seeds sown by wind created a colony’ then it turns to an intense personal experience. The daffodils are beautiful; they look happy resisting the wind. They represent simplicity, unity and life. Summary by Kholoud Al-Ejily

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In contrast, Wordworth's account is a poem, a public form that is meant to be published. The poem foregrounds a Romantic 'I' who wanders alone and disconnected, more cloud than human body, and who is identified as a poet.

Moreover, there are people in Dorothy’ accounts, such as the landlady, whereas the poem has no one but the poet. The Romantic ‘I’ is in the poem has no shared experience. The effect of reading the journal against the poem can be ambiguous. On one hand, the journal certifies the poem as true. On the other hand, it invalidates the claim to immediacy and memorability that the poem apparently makes on behalf of the experience, Wordworth needed something to remind him of the experience when he decided to write about it two years later. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From that, we can conclude that the difference between the two texts is the difference between private writing by a woman living in the 19th century and the public, conscious and ambitious self-inscription of a romantic male poet. The idea of authorship in that period was conditioned by the genre of the work and the gender of the writer. The male poet was regarded as more romantic than the female prose writer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------In conclusion, Wordworth’s “Daffodils” is a romantic poem with a biographical context highlighted in Dorothy’s journal. By comparing the two, we can see many similarities such as the theme, the shared vocabulary and the meticulous craft of each account, and many differences such as the tone and voice of the poem, that is a romantic poet who is disconnected and alone. A major characteristic of poets in the Romantic period.

Summary by Kholoud Al-Ejily

EXTRA WORDWORTH INFO: Nevertheless, reading Dorothy's journal alongside the poem seems to be a way of getting close to the poet himself, this is due to three reasons: 

The first is that Wordsworth himself considered living in this isolated part of the Lake District as an experiment in the imaginative life of a poet.

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The second is that in many of his important poems, his life, imagination, and consciousness were the central poetic subject.

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The third is that Wordsworth revised his poems many times during the course of his life, meaning that those poems exist in different manuscripts and printed versions. Reading those successive different forms of the poems means engaging closely with the poet's processes of composition.

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Summary by Kholoud Al-Ejily

POINT RASH JUDGEMENT In spite of being known as solitary genius, Wordsworth himself was not uncritical of the social, moral, and political implications of such a stance. This is the subject of a much less well-known poem, known, as ‘Point Rash-Judgment’, written and published in 1800. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------CLOSE READING ASPECTS: Voice: The poem’s ‘I’ stands for the poet. The poet is in “vacant mood” looking at the lake. Meter: It is written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) which is grander because it is the meter used by Shakespeare. Rhyme: Unrhymed Structure and diction: This poem has a more complicated form, and more difficult language. Imagery: Metaphor in ‘calm September yielded to the sun’, Personification in ‘lake asleep in a dead calm’ The theme of the poem: homecoming. It shows the anxiety when someone returns to find himself a stranger. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BIOGRAPHICAL ASPECT: Point Rash-Judgment’ describes some of the moral, political, and intellectual problems that run through Wordsworth’s poetry of 1800. They all stem from the problem of how to claim Grasmere as a fit ‘home’ for a poet. Wordworth spent much of his early life in Lake District where he enjoyed the beauty and freedom of nature. The collapse of political idealism meant that, like many other radical sympathizers at the time, the disillusioned Wordworth was urgently in search of a refuge from mainstream society, and the Lake District’s remoteness offered it. It represented a society free from both the horrors of industrialization and urbanization and the miseries produced by the new large-scale farming. When Wordsworth returned to the countryside after some time, he hoped to find refuge from the disillusionment he felt after the French Revolution and the spread of Industrialization.

However, he found the names of places have changed and he felt like a stranger.

Summary by Kholoud Al-Ejily

SHELLEY Shelley belongs to the second generation of romantic poets who expressed a prophetic tone. How does this voice appear In his poem “England 1819” what is he criticizing and prophesying. Romanticism is a literary movement, which was concerned with the self and the powers of the imagination. This period saw revolutionary forms of writing focusing on the exploration of the self and the unrealistic such as the Gothic, the confessional essay, autobiography/ biography. Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is regarded by critics as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. A radical in his poetry as well as his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death. Shelley is a free-thinking radical who looked down upon his class society. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------England in 1819 is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter. Like many of Shelley’s sonnets, it does not fit the rhyming patterns one might expect from a nineteenth-century sonnet.

Instead, the traditional Petrarchan division between the first eight lines and the final six lines is disregarded, so that certain rhymes appear in both sections: ABABABCDCDCCDD.

In fact, the rhyme scheme of this sonnet turns an accepted Petrarchan form upside-down, as does the thematic structure, at least to a certain extent: the first six lines deal with England’s rulers, the king and the princes, and the final eight deal with everyone else. The sonnet’s structure is out of joint, just as the sonnet proclaims England to be. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The speaker here is clearly an angry one, pouring scorn on the leechlike politicians who govern the country, and bursting through the constraints of the sonnet form in a declamatory, public invective. Shelley was a protesting poet and a free-thinking radical who satirized the establishment of his day. This political persona came to dominate the poet's reputation in the 20th century replacing the Victorian mythology. In this ‘realistic’ and sympathetic sonnet, Shelley presents a list of those responsible for the problems of England: the monarch, the unreformed parliament, the law, religion and the army. Shelley appears here as a political revolutionary and his romantic persona is delayed until the end when he speaks of the phantom. In this sonnet, Shelley assumes the role of a prophet predicting a hopeful future to come.

Summary by Kholoud Al-Ejily

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Shelley’s depiction of England in 1819 is realistic in some respects: King George III had been declared insane in 1810 and was to die in January 1820. Shelley is plainly an advocate for change and liberty, writing through a persona who sees things from below and sympathizes with the working class, people “starved and stabbed in the untilled field” of Peterloo. Similar attacks against royalty and corrupt and repressive public figures motivated a whole sequence of political poems Shelley composed in Italy in 1819, and might certainly lead us to conclude that the political revolution was part of his Romantic agenda. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Summary by Kholoud Al-Ejily

Discuss how the constructed image by his wife differs from the actual radical life of Shelley. In Mrs Shelley edit, Shelley is far less political than the Shelley who had been feted by radicals in the circulation of his first poem, Queen Mab. During his lifetime, he was infamous for atheism. In his poem “Queen Mab”, he attacked monarchy and religion. Shelley wanted to shock the traditional public. His advocacy of atheism and free love furthered the radical reputation he gained.

At that time, he was infamous also for his free love. His son’s custody lawsuit is an example. He had a number of illegitimate children. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Although she could not write a memoir on Shelley, Mary added notes to the poems forming a diary of Shelley’s Romantic life. Her own life is also included, especially her sense of loss when he died. Her notes helped create the image of Shelley as the tragic genius who died very young. Shelley the radical is rarely referred to in her notes. She said that he did not worry about the public: ‘he loved to shelter himself rather in the airiest flights of fancy, forgetting love and hate, and regret and lost hope’. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Here, the archetype of Shelley the Romantic poet was created. Mary Shelley constructed the archetype of Shelley as a poet of brilliant imagination; a poet who aspired to ideal lines. He is sheltered and escapes in the world of imagination. HOWEVER, his poems show different undertones of an ambitious poet who seeks literary recognition from the audience and who suffers from reality.

Summary by Kholoud Al-Ejily

Ozymandias by shelley. Shelley was conscious that history was at a turning point so his poems followi...