Wordsworth and the Druids

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
MATTHEW CAMPBELL
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Seasonal Cycle ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
English Poet ◽  
The Wanderer

This lecture presents the text of the speech about English poet William Wordsworth and the druids delivered by the author at the 2008 Warton Lecture on English Poetry held at the British Academy. It provides an analysis of the beginning of Book III of The Excursion and explains the concepts of the Poet, the Wanderer, and the Solitary. The lecture suggests that Wordsworth's characters inhabit a common land until modernity takes it away from them, and that this dissolves the natural regenerative seasonal cycle in which humans now find it so difficult to live and work.

scholarly journals The “Healing Touch” of Nature: Corresponding Elements in the Poetry of William Wordsworth and Jibanananda Das

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-192
Author(s):  
Firoze Basu
Keyword(s):  
William Wordsworth ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Healing Touch ◽  
The West

This paper endeavours to find resonances between Wordsworth's treatment and responses to Nature and Jibanananda's fascination with rural Bengal. A lecturer in English, he tried to bring the West to the Bengali psyche and consciousness utilizing the unique strategy of de-familiarizing the Bengali landscape. In effecting this achievement Jibanananda's familiarity with English poetry is of paramount importance. He has analogical and genealogical similarities with Keats and Wordsworth's particularly Wordsworth, in the celebrations of solitude, of nature.

The thematic significance of enta geweorc and related imagery in The Wanderer

1973 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 253-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Frankis
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Final Section ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Wanderer

Our uncertainty about the full implications for poet and audience of particular words and phrases is a serious obstacle to our understanding of Old English poetry. With regard to the final section of The Wanderer (73–115) some advances in our knowledge and understanding have already been made, notably by Professor J. E. Cross in his studies of the Latin antecedents of two passages: he shows that lines 80–4 use the motif of the Fates of Men, with the Old English sum … sum … structure translating the Latin alius … alius …, and that lines 92–6 are based on the ubi sunt topos of the transience of life. This information gives us a better grasp of the impact these lines may have had on an informed Anglo-Saxon audience and helps us to evaluate the poem; but many details still remain unclear. The present study is concerned with the context of these two passages (73–105), and in particular with the puzzling image of ‘the work of giants’ that has been destroyed by God (85–7).

Linguistic facts and the interpretation of Old English poetry

1975 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 11-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
The Wanderer

In their admirable edition ofThe WandererDunning and Bliss give the meaning ‘as when’ forswain line 43bpinceð him on mode pæt he his mondryhtenclyppe ond cysse, ond on cneo lecgehonda ond heafod, swa he hwilum ærin geardagum giefstolas breac (41–4)and defend their gloss in the following words: ‘Here literary considerations must outweigh linguistic arguments.’ And in his latest book, Stanley B. Greenfield approves: ‘Thus Bliss–Dunning…can properly say that though usage ofswameaning “as when” here “would be unique”, but [sic] “literary considerations must outweigh linguistic arguments”.’ I do not approve. I would say that Dunning and Bliss have let literary considerations outweigh not linguisticarguments, but linguisticfacts. Hence my title.

Wordsworth’s Translation of Aeneid 1–3 and the Earlier Tradition of English Translations of Virgil

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Hardie
Keyword(s):  
English Poetry ◽  
English Poet ◽  
English Translations ◽  
History Of

William Wordsworth’s translation of the first three books of the Aeneid are the focus of this chapter. As a major translation project by a major English poet, this work of Wordsworth can be compared with the Aeneid of Dryden (with whom he competes) and with Pope’s Iliad. Hardie considers Wordsworth’s undertaking not only within the longer history of English translations of the Aeneid, but also within the larger history of English poetry. In his anxious literary competition with Dryden, Wordsworth chooses the rhyming couplet for his translation to show how a different verse movement and vocabulary can produce another version of the classic English Aeneid.

The maritime imagination and the paradoxical mind in Old English poetry

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 21-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonina Harbus
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
The Body ◽  
Suitable Model ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Old English Poetry ◽  
Mental Experience ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Wanderer

AbstractThe specifically maritime imagination of Anglo-Saxon poets resolves the potentially incongruous metaphorical models of the mind in this culture as both an enclosure and a wandering entity. The dual containing and travelling aspects of the ship provide a suitable model for the embodied yet metaphysical mind, and act in conjunction with the widespread metaphor of life as a sea voyage to produce a coherent means of imagining how the mind operates in relation to the body. The Wanderer and The Seafarer illustrate how acutely this conventionalized way of representing physical and mental experience relies on the sea voyage as both the setting for and metaphorical representation of a human consciousness that is both enclosed in the body and also able to transcend the physical.

scholarly journals Literary duel: Barclay vs. Keats in the context of the translation of a little-known poem

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liudmila Vyacheslavovna Fomina
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Language Translation ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Original Language ◽  
English Poet ◽  
New Name ◽  
Physical Beauty

Two interpretations of mythological plot about Endymion are investigated. The nineteenth century provides the interpretational variety of the myth about Endymion in English poetry. Keats's Endymion is a romantic character who is looking for an ideal of beauty and love embodied in the Goddess of the Moon. Barclay`s Endymion is weak-willed. His suicide symbolizes the collapse of romantic ideals in the reality of Victorianism. As for the image of the Goddess of the Moon she embodies an ideal of femininity, passion, spiritual and physical beauty in the poem by Keats. Barclay`s version depicts a pragmatic, selfish beauty, belonging to the elite society. Having enjoyed а poor shepherd`s youth and his beauty she left him to live in luxury on Olympus. Barclay`s interpretation is considered as a critique of romantic ideals and Romanticism on the whole. The Ukrainian (the first from the original language) translation of Barclay`s interpretation about Endymion is of particular interest. The discovery of a little-known English poet Donald Hugh Barclay and an attempt to study his creation give a possibility to introduce a new name to the literature criticism. This article opens the prospects for further consideration of literary endymionade.

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