Essay - We Are So Accustomed to Thinking of William Wordsworth as...

We are so accustomed to thinking of William Wordsworth as the quintessential Romantic poet - a m*****n in love with the idea of a simple life lived close to n*****ture - that we are apt to overlook the fact that his relationship ***** nature is in fact a somewh*****t ambivalent one, or at least a complex one. While Wordsworth will always be known for ***** clarity and undiluted Romanticism of "T*****tern Ab*****y," to assume that his stance vis-a-vis nature in this poem constitutes an adequate description ***** all of his connections to and understandings of the external world does him a disservice. To do so would be ***** equate ***** passion for the natural world and the necessity of direct human connection to nature ***** a simple-minded sort of tendency to ramble on about beauty. Rather, if we look beyond "Tintern Abbey" to the whole body of his work, we came to a fuller understanding of the ways in which he embraced the human as *****ll as the natural world around him. "St. Paul's," a poem that Wordsworth penned in 1808 but never published, is an excellent *****strument to use through which to discover the complex worldview of this poet.

It may be argued that ********** ever-shifting, ever becoming more refined ********** about his own place in the world (and the meaning ***** ***** life lived in the world) reflected continual changes in his underst*****ing of ***** c*****ing as one particular kind of ***** as opposed to another. The poet who speaks to us of such bliss in f*****ding his soul wedded to the natural world in his early poems, who shakes off the constraints of classical meter and rhyme altogether in his 18th-century ***** comes at the end ***** his life to a different sense of his ***** in the universe and ***** *****ing so also transforms the voice in which he speaks. For his vision of his relationship to the ***** beyond his own experiences is throughout h***** life a s**********ping element of his *****ic *****, and as this vision ***** so does his style (Lucas 1975).

We will in fact see that by ***** end of his life, ***** the middle of the 19th century, that Wordsworth is a man humbled before ***** expansiveness of the human m*****d, ***** the power of imagination. "The Prelude," ***** ***** added to over a number of years and which is clearly in fundamental ***** (even if not ***** all ***** the particulars) au*****biographical in fact serves as a far better keyst***** for understand*****g Wordsworth's work as a whole than does a poem like "Tintern *****" or even "St. *****" - although reading "*****. Paul's" in the context of "The *****" provides insights both into the earlier poem and in to W*****dsworth's understanding (at least in 1808) of the relationship between city and country, between God and *****. The importance of these ********** is impossible ***** dismiss in a poem like "***** Prelude," in which Wordsworth writes (in Book 14)

T*****