By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ is one of William Wordsworth’s best-known and best-loved poems. You can read ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ here before proceeding to the summary and analysis below.
Perhaps the best way to offer an analysis of this long poem is to go through it, section by section. So we’ll offer a sort of combined summary and analysis as we go.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Perfect Woman’, sometimes known by its first line, ‘She was a phantom of delight’, is a poem William Wordsworth (1770-1850) wrote in 1804 about his wife, Mary Hutchinson. The poem is a classic example of uxorious poetry – poetry written about the love for a wife – and although its meaning is fairly straightforward, a few words of analysis will help to elucidate certain features of Wordsworth’s ‘Perfect Woman’. First, though, here’s the poem:
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The poem commonly known as ‘Tintern Abbey’ actually has a much longer title. When the poem first appeared in Lyrical Ballads (1798) as a last-minute addition, it bore the title ‘Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’ is a short lyric poem by William Wordsworth (1770-1850), perhaps the greatest and most celebrated English Romantic poet. But, aside from its reasonably well-known opening line, ‘It is a beauteous evening, calm and free’ is not usually listed among Wordsworth’s best-known poems.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The sonnet was popular among the Romantic poets. John Keats wrote many, including the celebrated ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’; Shelley gave us ‘Ozymandias’; and a pioneering female poet, Charlotte Turner Smith, was both a proto-Romantic poet and the person often credited with causing a revival of the sonnet among English poets.