Word: wordsworthian
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Romantic theory and practice glorified individual feeling and self-expression. Keats rejected what he called this "Wordsworthian egotistical sublime." Instead he sought to be a "chameleon poet," who is submerged in his subject through "empathy"-the projecting of one's self into the feelings of others, even such slight creatures as sparrows scrabbling for crumbs in the street, or a field mouse peeping out of a field's withered grass. "Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated," he wrote to Sister Fanny, "the energies displayed in it are fine. . . This is the very...
...knocked over by a tram or anything' "), and his memoir gives horribly credible, detailed illustration of Poet Randall Jarrell's line: "From my mother's sleep I fell into the State." Shrewd, wary, knowing, and precociously cynical, Dinger is yet troubled by Wordsworthian intimations of immortality. Dimly, he is aware that the presence of a soul is a handicap in his strife with life. Of the soul, he observes: "I'd rather have a sock full of two-bob bits." Thus, it is not a tram but a moral issue that runs over Dinger Bell...
...Utopian experiment consisted chiefly in following the Wordsworthian principles of "plain living and high thinking." Shunning his parents' wealthy house, FitzGerald rented a small cottage in Suffolk, where he lived for 16 years with a dog, a cat and a parrot. His staple diet was bread, fruit, cheese and fish, his recreations walking and sailing, his routine "of an even, grey-paper character." "He [lives]," complained one of his friends, "in a state of disgraceful indifference to everything, except grass and fresh air. . . . Half the self-sacrifice . . . the moral resolution, which he exercises . . . would amply furnish forth a martyr...
...most recent issue of Nature to reach the U.S., a fellow of the Royal Society, Dr. Vincent B. Wigglesworth, at long last pointed out that Wordsworth was a strange bedfellow for scientists' "self-esteem." In evidence, Dr. Wigglesworth cited other Wordsworthian lines...
Beyond this point, Professor Read also falls into line with the conventional Wordsworthian criticism. The relations of man and nature are discussed much as critics have always done. The only difference here is that the source for it all has been changed...