Wednesday, April 13, 2016

I need to write a critical essay on a poem(s) of Wordsworth. However, I can not come up with a topic. Can anyone give me any ideas? What ideas generate from the poems of this writer?

William Wordsworth was a Romantic poet writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Romantic poets, partly as a reaction against the industrial revolution which was happening at the time, wrote poems to celebrate nature. They wrote about the beauty of nature but also about how connecting with the natural world can be a healing, spiritual process. This would be a good topic for you to focus on if you decide to write on Wordsworth's poetry.
Romantic poets, like Wordsworth, also emphasize in their work the importance of the metaphysical (the spiritual and emotional) and put forward the idea that the metaphysical is as important, or more important than the physical. This might also be a topic that you could explore in Wordsworth's poems.
There are two Wordsworth poems in particular which you might look at with these ideas in mind. One is "Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," and the other is "I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud."
"Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" is about a place of natural beauty in Wales that Wordsworth liked to visit. He liked to visit this place because it was a beautiful, natural landscape that made him feel better after being in the noise and chaos of the city.
"I wandered Lonely As A Cloud" is a more straightforward poem mostly about a "host, of golden daffodils" that flutter in the breeze. Wordsworth finds the scene so beautiful that it makes him feel blissful and at peace with the world. The loneliness alluded to in the title is, for Wordsworth, a good kind of loneliness. Indeed, one reason he likes the natural world so much is because it is away from the hustle and bustle and crowds of the city, and so in the natural world one can be alone, in a peaceful, meditative sense.
I hope these ideas help to get you started. Good luck with your essay!

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