2007. november 15., csütörtök

William Wordsworth

1. Preface to Lyrical Ballads:
How does he define the ‘poet’?
What does he say about the spontaneity of composition?
What does he say about the language of poetry and in what way does that represent a democratic turn in poetry?

2. ‘Lines: Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey…’:
What is the form and the versification?
What is the situation and where is the speaker?
What happens in the first stanza (here: verse paragraph)? What are the keywords?
What happens in the second stanza? What happened to the speaker while he was away? What had he got from the landscape before he left?
What is the situation in stanza four? What has changed since his youth? What was nature for him then and what is it now? How does he describe the relationship between man and nature?
What is in the focus in stanza five? Who is he speaking to? What is his relationship to nature like?
Define the term ‘pantheism’ and relate it to the poem.
Make your interpretation of the last sentence.

3. ‘I Wandered Lonely and a Cloud’
What is the situation? What is the speaker doing? What is his position and what is the setting?
Look up these words in a dictionary: ‘alone’ and ‘solitary’. Are there any differences between the meanings? How does that difference relate to the mood of the poem?
Look at the way the tenses of verbs change from the first to the last stanza. What does that say about the time of composition?
Go back to the Preface, find the phrase ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, read the explanation, and try to explain Wordsworth’s technique of poetic composition.

4. ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge…’
What is the form and genre?
What is the setting (time, place, situation)?
What is the connection between the place and the speaker’s mind?
Why is the exact time and place of composition given in the title?

5. Find instance of the sublime and the picturesque in various poems.

6. Find ballads and examine the stanza form, the dramatic situation, the characters and the tone.

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