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William WordsworthA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The poem’s full title, following the 18th-century tradition of locodescriptive poetry, establishes the occasion of the poem, noting the precise place and time of its composition. Though commonly abbreviated as “Tintern Abbey,” the poem makes no mention of the famous ruined church and its immediate environs, and only a passing reference to the hordes of “vagrant dwellers” (20) that inhabited the ruin, with whom Wordsworth most certainly had contact during his tour of the vicinity with Dorothy. Several New Historicist and political critics, such as Marjorie Levinson, have seized upon this omission, arguing that Wordsworth erases the sociopolitical setting of the poem, substituting an idealized, abstract, pastoral landscape for a politically charged location rife with complex historical significance and unsettling contradictions. For Levinson, “Tintern Abbey” voices Wordsworth’s attempt to escape from cultural values, historical institutions, disturbing facts, and conflicting ideologies—in short, the political moment at hand—to realize an imaginative fiction of memory and desire. Other critics, such as Helen Vendler, argue that such cultural materialist readings, based on mimetic ideals of historical and political factuality, are appropriate for social literary forms like the novel but misunderstand the purpose and character of
By William Wordsworth
A Complaint
William Wordsworth
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
William Wordsworth
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
William Wordsworth
Daffodils
William Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth
London, 1802
William Wordsworth
Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
My Heart Leaps Up
William Wordsworth
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
William Wordsworth
Preface to Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways
William Wordsworth
She Was a Phantom of Delight
William Wordsworth
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
The Solitary Reaper
William Wordsworth
The World Is Too Much with Us
William Wordsworth
To the Skylark
William Wordsworth
We Are Seven
William Wordsworth