And I'm back to the Romantics.
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| Wordsworth by William Shuter |
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in
the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but
hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of
humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though
of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I
have felt
A presence that disturbs me
with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense
sublime
Of something far more deeply
interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of
setting suns,
And the round ocean and the
living air,
And the blue sky, and in the
mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that
impels
All thinking things, all
objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things
I have been enthralled by
those lines and the idea behind them since the first time I read William
Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, which you can read here. But my task in the first essay of my first
semester at the Australian National University, following my return to
undergraduate study, is to take the poems apart.
Four hundred words or so into
my essay, here’s my argument against Coleridge and Wordsworth:
This essay
discusses the treatment of gender in the poems.
In contrast to the poets’ claims to be addressing the natural or universal
characteristics of the human condition this essay argues that the texts reveal
a gendered view of ‘the vast empire of human society’ in
which the circumstances, condition and perspective of the male – especially the
creative imagination of the male poet – is privileged within the 'natural' world, the
poetry that emerges from the male experience of that world and in relation to
women who are assumed to be inferior to men.
Sorry guys, although I still
love many of your works.
