1,733,283 research outputs found
The coo-ee songs of Australia [music].
No full textCover title.; A pamphlet listing the names of 17 songs of the Coo-ee songs of Australia and with some lyrics for the songs Love's surrender and My blue rose. Includes melody line and words for Austral's coo-ee greeting song / words & music by Maude Wordsworth James.; Also available online http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-an21234431
Wordsworth and death
No full textWordsworth is known as the poet of joy and hope, and to associate his name with death may seem at first strange. Yet, according to his own estimation, he was the poet not simply of joy but of “the very heart of man," of "human kind, and what we are”, of "men as they are men within themselves." Any vision of human nature which does not take into account the facts of mortality and bereavement is blinkered and inevitably inadequate and Wordsworth was committed to clarity of perception and the fullest insights of the Imagination. He did not shy away from the implications of “our mortal Nature”; throughout his career, he sought to portray in poetry the place of death in human life.
Two basic ways of understanding mortality are considered in this thesis: the first is death as disjunction, extinction, the end; the second is death as part of a larger continuity, a threshold, a stage. The conflict between these two visions was fundamental to Wordsworth's thought, and writing. Isolation and despair were the corollaries of the first vision, while the capacity for love and hope which was essential to the life of the human spirit was nurtured and made possible by the second. Wordsworth wrestled in his writings with the effects of these different visions of death on the complexities of human nature.
The thesis has been divided into three main parts. Section I - Death in Wordsworth's Time - seeks to place the poet into a historical context. Section II - Death in Wordsworth' Life - is concerned with Wordsworth's personal experiences of loss and feelings about his own mortality, And in Section III - Death in Wordsworth's Poetry - what he had to say about death is considered in relation to some of the other major themes in his poetry
Dorothy Wordsworth and Hartley Coleridge : the poetics of relationship
No full textMy thesis studies Hartley Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth to redress the unjust neglect of Hartley’s work, and to reach a more positive understanding of Dorothy’s conflicted literary relationship with William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I provide a complete reassessment of the often narrowly read prose and poetry of these two critically marginalized figures, and also investigate the relationships that affected their lives, literary self-constructions, and reception; in this way, I restore a more accurate account of Hartley and Dorothy as independent and original writers, and also highlight both the inhibiting and cathartic affects of writing from within a familial literary context.
My analysis of the writings of Hartley and Dorothy and the dialogues in which they engage with the works of STC and William, argues that both Hartley and Dorothy developed a strong relational poetics in their endeavour to demarcate their independent subjectivities. Furthermore, through a survey of the significance of the sibling bond – literal and figurative – in the texts and lives of all these writers, I demonstrate a theory of influence which recognizes lateral, rather than paternal, kinship as the most influential relationship. I thus conclude that authorial identity is not fundamentally predetermined by, and dependent on, gender or literary inheritance, but is more significantly governed by domestic environment, familial readership, and immediate kinship.
My thesis challenges the long-standing misconceptions that Hartley was unable to achieve a strong poetic identity in STC’s shadow, and that Dorothy’s independent authorial endeavour was primarily thwarted by gender. To replace these misreadings, I foreground the successful literary independence of both writers: my approach reinstates Hartley Coleridge’s literary standing as a major poet who bridged Romanticism and Victorian literature, and promotes Dorothy Wordsworth as one of the finest descriptive writers of nature and relationship
Staging imagination: transformations of Shakespeare in Wordsworth and Coleridge
Get PDFThis thesis examines the ways that Wordsworth and Coleridge transform the works of Shakespeare, in order to stage the imagination as it functions in the lives of the characters in their poetry. I look especially at the importance of the play A Midsummer Night 's Dream to their poetic project, and show how elements of the play resurface in various poems, prefaces and prose writings of the two poets over a span of nearly twenty years. I argue that Wordsworth's transformations of Shakespeare contribute to a democratising of poetry, and a valorising of 'our common human heart'. Chapter one discusses Lyrical Ballads as a series of poems, which have Theseus' speech on Imagination as their unifying theme, emulating Shakespeare’s staging of passion. Chapters two and three examine Alexander Tytler's Essay on Translation as a 'negative' stimulus for Wordsworth's challenging poetic theories, and a source for some of his earliest 'transformations' of Shakespeare. Chapter four is a detailed survey of the critical background, and the Romantic reception of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and examines key themes in the play to elucidate the poets' poetry and prose. Chapter five is a comparison between 'The Last of The Flock' and The Merchant of Venice, showing how Wordsworth 'imitates' the tale, and transposes the 'tone' of the comic play into a quieter and sadder 'music'. Chapter six analyses 'Michael', as a transformation of Gaunt in Richard into the 'history homely and rude' of Michael the shepherd. Chapter seven is on Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, which re-tells the tale of the genesis of Lyrical Ballads, and Wordsworth's transformative poetics, as a 'translation' of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Chapter eight returns to Alfoxden, and Hazlitt's 'First Acquaintance with Poets', to revisit the poets as the protagonists of 'the dream' that was, and became, Lyrical Ballads
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Lord Lonsdale and his proteges: William Wordsworth and John Hardie
No full textThe notion of nature in Coleridge and Wordsworth from the perspective of ecotheology
Get PDFThis thesis aims to examine the idea of nature in the works of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth from the perspective of ecotheology.
Its intention is not to identify their works with ecotheology, but it will be
suggested how Coleridge’s search for the unity of the universe and
Wordsworth’s yearning for dwelling relate to recent developments in
ecotheological theory. Ecotheology can thus help us understand their ideas on
nature. There is a historical and disciplinary gap between the works of the
Romantic Period and ecotheology, and, in Romantic criticism, the idea of nature
is often misunderstood as a mere projection of the mind. Moreover, Coleridge’s
poetry has been the subject of an unjustified ideological criticism that has
misrepresented its theological viewpoints, and Wordsworth has also been read
in terms of a secular narrative about nature and consciousness. However, both
Coleridge and Wordsworth to some extent perceive nature as an environmental
landscape, and therefore nature can be understood as an independent reality as
well as a creation of the mind. They develop ideas of God in their literary works
in a way that needs to be understood not in a secular way, but in a religious
sense. Just as ecotheology attempts to articulate the value of the non-human
natural world, so Coleridge’s notion of unity and Wordsworth’s idea of dwelling
affirm similar values throughout their works.
Focusing in Chapter 1 on the writings of a number of twentieth-century
theologians, including Jűrgen Moltmann and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, I will
outline the development of key ideas in ecotheology in terms of three main
elements, the interrelatedness of the universe, the independent sacred value of
nature, and a cosmic eschatology, which will be used as a conceptual
framework for exploring the works of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Chapter 2 will
show that Coleridge’s lifelong search for the unity of the universe reveals the
interrelatedness of the universe, and the sacredness of nature as an
independent value. Chapter 3 will see that Wordsworth’s idea of dwelling also
implies these two elements. Chapter 4 will show that their eschatological
visions are associated with a cosmic eschatology, of which the non-human
natural world constitutes a crucial part
Wordsworth and Basho: Walking Poets
No full textThis exhibition of manuscripts (original and facsimile copies) of William Wordsworth and Matsuo Basho, shown alongside work by contemporary UK and Japanese artists working individually and collaboratively (painters, poets, musicians, sculptors and calligraphers), aims to show that there is much to be gained by comparing and contrasting Eastern (Japanese) and Western (Romantic) views of nature.
Working from the original manuscripts of Wordsworth and the romantic poets held by the Wordsworth Trust and both original or facsimile copies of texts by the Haiku master, Matsuo Basho and his contemporaries, the show will emphasize the importance of reflecting upon our emotional response to nature. It will argue for a rebalancing a view of the world that has, since the Enlightenment, placed greater importance on measuring and recording experience, whilst de-valuing our emotional responses to the natural world.
The exhibition focuses on two related themes. Related in that they explore the importance of re-developing an embodied relationship to our environment.
Firstly, it explores a relationship between the act of walking and creating (art) through the work of two inveterate walker/poets – Wordsworth and Basho. Thomas De Quincey reckoned that Wordsworth “must have traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles - a mode of exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is most excellent in his writings."
Two of the most important experiences related in The Prelude, for instance, found their origins in mountain walks (when overawed by the Ravine of Gondo, the “gloomy Pass” and during a night walk to the top of Snowdon).
Basho’s art reached its greatest form during his five-month trip to the Deep North in 1689, during which he wrote his masterpiece The Narrow Road to the Deep North. In this poem/travel book,he recounts the last long walk he completed with his disciple Sora—some 1,200 miles covered over five months beginning in May 1689.
Secondly, the exhibition proposes that there is a close relationship to the form and framing of the script used by Wordsworth and Basho and the landscapes (natural and social) in which the texts were written and through which the writers/poets walked. The exhibition will explore the idea developed by writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth that there is a specific relationship between the word used to describe an object or thing and the object itself – a poetic, embodied relationship. Coleridge believed that ‘words can embody and not just stand for thoughts and things’ … and he ‘puts his faith in words as “living things” – as plants, as live bodies.
Indeed, one the artists in the show (calligrapher Ewan Clayton), has a long-standing interest in the calligraphy and writing of the Far East (including the poetry and manuscripts of Basho). In his recent book (The Golden Thread – The Story of Writing), he explores how the ‘experience of sensing movement in the natural world and transferring it into the felt movement of writing is shared across many traditions’ … both East and West. Basho and Wordsworth explored the world by walking through it – and their resulting embodied experiences were mediated by the medium of pen or brush on paper.
A series of new essays in an accompanying publication will expand on many of these issues as well as exploring the relationship of the self to the world – reflecting on the similarities and differences between the Romantics’ embodied view of the world and the Japanese (Eastern, Buddhist) view of the self’s ‘emptying-out’.
The idea for this exhibition arose, initially from a study produced by the Wordsworth Trust and the Arts Council called Beyond Words: Understanding and Sharing the Meaning of Manuscripts. In it Jeff Cowton, Curator at The Wordsworth Trust, described handwriting as a visual form which can ‘mimic the texture of thought’, revealing valuable clues as to the state of mind of the creator
[Autograph] / William Wordsworth.
No full textAn autograph from Wordsworth has been affixed to the back of Faraday\u27s November 7, 1858 letter to George Wilson; as Faraday makes no acknowledgment of the autograph, it may have been affixed there at a later date. See also additional letters in the collection from Faraday.Wordsworth\u27s autograph is affixed below a name and address for James Silk Buckingham, Stanhope Lodge, Upper Avenue Road, St. John\u27s Wood, London, March 7, 1853
Susanna Blamire, Medicine, and Romantic Women's Poetry
No full textThis event took place on 28 April 2022 and was in collaboration with the University of Northumbria.
Romantic poet Susanna Blamire (1747-1794) was a prolific Cumbria-based writer who explored topics including healthcare, religion and travel in both verse and prose. Little of her body of work was published during her lifetime.
Over the last 25 years the Wordsworth Trust worked with Christopher Hugh Maycock, Blamire’s descendent and biographer (A Passionate Poet, Hypatia Press 2003; Selected Poems, Bookcase, 2008), to preserve her surviving manuscript works. Her writings not only reveal the hidden history of women’s medical work in the 18th century but form a starting point for exploring what good healthcare looks like in past, present and future.
In this event our speakers took an in-depth look at Blamire’s life and writing, and showcased manuscripts and objects from the Wordsworth Trust’s collection. They explored topics including the experience of illness and disability in the late 18th century, how women influenced healthcare while being barred from medical school, and how creativity can interact with wellbeing.
This event accompanied ‘(Re)Acting Romanticism: Disability and Women Writers’ at Wordsworth Grasmere, an exhibition that took place from April-May 2022.
If you enjoyed this video, please consider making a donation to the Wordsworth Trust: https://wordsworth.org.uk/support
Wordsworth and the cultivation of women
No full textFocusing on the poems of Wordsworth's "Great Decade," feminist critics have tended to see Wordsworth as an exploiter of women and "feminine" perspectives. In this original and provocative book, Judith Page examines works from throughout Wordsworth's long career to offer a more nuanced feminist account of the poet's values. She asks questions about Wordsworth and women from the point of view of the women themselves and of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture. Making extensive use of family letters, journals, and other documents, as well as unpublished material by the poet's daughter Dora Wordsworth, Page presents Wordsworth as a poet not defined primarily by egotistical sublimity but by his complicated and conflicted endorsement of domesticity and familial life
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