Tyr’s Day, March 25: Spontaneous Overflow
EQ: How did Wordsworth’s poetry and philosophy define Romanticism?
- Welcome! Gather LAST WEEK’S WORK, Wordsworth sheet ( this picture is on it), paper, pen/cil, wits!
- Introduction: Romanticism
- CLOZE
- Reading and Response: William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads
- Students complete Reading Guide, write Reading Journal entry
ELACC12RL-RI2: Analyze two or more themes or central ideas of text
ELACC12RL3: Analyze the impact of the author’s choices regarding elements of a story
ELACC12RI3: Analyze and explain how individuals, ideas, or events interact and develop
ELACC12RI6: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text
ELACC12RI8: Delineate and evaluate the reasoning in seminal British texts
ELACC12RL-RI9: Analyze for theme, purpose rhetoric, and how texts treat similar themes or topics
ELACC12RL10: Read and comprehend complex literature independently and proficiently.
ELACC12W2: Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas
ELACC12W4: Produce clear and coherent writing appropriate to task, purpose, and audience
ELACC12W5: Develop and strengthen writing by planning, revising, editing, rewriting
ELACC12W10: Write routinely over extended and shorter time frames
ELACC12SL1: Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions
ELACC12SL3: Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, evidence and rhetoric
ELACC12L1: Demonstrate standard English grammar and usage in speaking and writing.
ELACC12L2: Use standard English capitalization, punctuation, spelling in writing.
ELACC12L3: Demonstrate understanding of how language functions in different contexts
The Romantic Era (1780s - 1830s)
Major Idea: Individual Imagination is best guide to Truth
- Following Milton: Individual Mind is the ONLY reliable pathway to God and Truth
- Following Swift: BUT purelylogical, systematic,“rational” thinking is at best flawed, at worst leads to destruction
- Following Blake: must acknowledge, accept, indeed seek the mysterious and spontaneous
- Spontaneity, Emotion, Mystery indicate “real”
- Distrust of Organized, Merely “Rational” Systems
- Following Descartes: Individual Imagination not only perceives reality but actually creates reality
The Romantic Era (1780s - 1830s)
Major Idea: Individual Imagination is best guide to Truth
- Distrust of Elites and Collective Society (gov’t, church, schools, industry)
- Celebration of “common” folk who were traditionally ignored or outcast (children, workers, peasants, poor, rural, insane, deformed)
- Love of Nature more than Civilization
- “Nature Without Check With Original Energy” (Whitman)
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798)
was revolutionary many ways:
- A true collaboration – both wrote some, cowrote some
- As in Milton, Blake, full of the clash of opposites –here, common and strange
- WW – tall, dignified, quiet; wrote about “common” folk,things, situations, treated as if brand new, miraculous
- STC – lumpy, self-indulgent, loud; wrote about weird, fantastic phenomena happening to common people
Instant HUGE seller; changed English literature forever
William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”(1802)
Excerpted and adapted from
The principal object which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, as far as was possible, in a selection of the language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and, above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them the primary laws of our nature....
All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who ... had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are representatives of all our past feelings....
I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity : the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried on ; but the emotion, of whatever kind and in whatever degree, from various causes is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will upon the whole be in a state of enjoyment.
CLOZE: The Romantic Era
1.The Romantic Era is usually though to have run from about ______to about ______.
2.Its major idea is that the ______is our truest guide.
3.Following Swift and Blake, Romantics distrusted thinking that was purely ______, favoring instead thinking that was more ______.
4.Following Descartes, Romantics argued that Imagination actually ______reality.
5.Romantics tended to trust and celebrate traditionally ______classes of people – for example, ______and ______– instead of more traditional societal powers – for example, ______and ______.
6.Romantics tended to trust and celebrate ______more than civilization.
7.William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge collaborated in the year ______on a volume of poetry called ______.
8.In language and topics, it represented a clash of the ______and the ______.
Reading Guide: Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”
9.Wordsworth says he chose “incidents and situations from ______life” as his topics.
10.He says that he wanted to discuss these topics, “as far as was ______, in a ______of the language ______by ______.”
11.Freewrite 10 words: What is paradoxical, contradictory, or ironic about that statement?
12.“All good poetry,” says Wordsworth, “is the ______of ______” – BUT, he goes on to say, such poems can only be “produced” by “a man who had also ______and ______.”
13.Freewrite 10 words: What is paradoxical, contradictory, or ironic about that statement?
14.Poetry “takes its origin,” he says, “from ______recollected in ______.”
15.Freewrite 10 words: What is paradoxical, contradictory, or ironic about that statement?
Turn In Today:
CLOZE: The Romantic Era
Reading Guide: Wm Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”
Reading Journal Entry: Wm Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”