Part Four
William Wordsworth's Sonnets:
The Love Affair with the World
Background:
- William Wordsworth lived from 1770-1850
- Though the sonnet had fallen out of favor in the eighteenth century, the Romantic poets revived it.
- Following in the footsteps of the great Renaissance writer, John Milton, "Wordsworth used the sonnet for moral and political reflection, and also for poetic statements of a more public kind" (Adventures in English Literature, 488).
- Wordsworth used the sonnet to express his passionate affinity or disgust with the world (either natural or artificial) around him.
- The most crucial issue for Romantic poets is the speaker's relationship with nature. "The process of memory in Wordsworth's poetry is very often set in motion by his response to the natural world, and it is the natural world to which Wordsworth returns again and again, as the great source of human happiness and fulfillment... Wordsworth is interested in nature as it affects guides, and nourishes the human mind" (474).
- "Although Wordsworth wrote sonnets throughout his poetic career, many of his finest achievements in the form {including the two provided here} were written between the summer of 1802, when he returned to France for the first time in ten years, and 1807, when his collected Poems in Two Volumes was published" (486).
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