Wordsworth and Coleridge
Wordsworth
and Coleridge are the two most important poets of the first English romantic
period.
They worked
together to create the collection "Lyrical
Ballads", and they have some different point of view about poetry, nature
and imagination.
Imagination:
- Wordsworth believes that
imagination is used to enrich simple ideas in tranquillity. Men has this
faculties before the birth and they lost it growing up;
- Coleridge divides it into primary and secondary, and it is the capacity of perceive the world
around us (common to all people) and then the capacity of order those
memories and enrich them with supernatural.
Nature:
- Wordsworth feels nature as full
of life, as it would be a part of us, in order to a Pantheistic vision;
nature is opposed to town, it is a source of feelings and it is pervaded
by an active force;
- Coleridge, instead, sees the
nature as the One Life (a divine power), and all his description of
landscapes or natural elements, are endowed with a deeper symbolic
meaning.
Poetry:
- Wordsworth
says the poetry is a spontaneous expression of feelings; it is "emotion recollected in tranquillity".
The poet takes inspiration from rustic life, and then, he combines the
memory of those emotions, with the use of imagination.
- Coleridge
believes that poetry is a product of unconscious and it creates a kind of
ecstasy, reproduced with the use of memory and the adding of supernatural
elements.
