Status Updates From Radical Wordsworth: The Poe...

Absolutely fascinating that so much of the national parks movements in both Britain and the US can be traced back to the influence that Wordsworth had on his readers. John Muir, for instance, was a huge fan, Wordsworth being a poet of the sublime beauty of wild places.

Fascinating! Bate also explores the emergence of another literary form in the late 1700s: the travel guide!! I kept thinking of Pride and Prejudice since the travel guides were often about the Lakes and of course Wordsworth came to be known as a Lakes poet. Sooo interesting.

French critic Hippolyte Taine writes in 1864: “On the eve of the 19th century began in Europe the great modern revolution. The thinking public and the human mind changed…then was manifest the disease of the age…discontent with the present, the vague desire of a higher beauty, and an ideal happiness, the painful aspiration for the infinite…” (316-317).

A history of Romanticism in chapter 14. I am so here for it! 💃🏻

Wordsworth writing about his poetry after bad reviews: “Trouble not yourself upon the present reception of these poems, of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny, to console the afflicted, to add sunshine…by making the happy happier, to teach the young and gracious…to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous…” (309-310).

“The late 18th century witnessed the birth of the belief that nothing matters more to us as human beings than our sensations, our feelings, and accordingly the notion that individualism and an individual’s ideals—whatever they may be—define our freedom and our modernity” (213).

Underlining basically the whole chapter about Wordsworth and Coleridge’s time in Germany learning about Romanticism.

So funny that locals thought Wordsworth and Coleridge were French spies because they appeared to be out with paper and pencil mapping the Bristol Channel. Actually they were writing snatches of poetry and philosophizing.

I am really loving this. This chapter was about Wordsworth’s time in France as the Revolution was getting more intense circa 1792. Really fascinating.

Ah ha! The Cult of Sensibility is discussed. I was hoping this would be a good Jane Austen July companion and so it is. Fascinating about poet and writer Helen Maria Williams reporting via letters from the front lines of the French Revolution.

“Sometimes…we remember in singular flashes. Particular adventures and misadventures become part of family lore. And particular incidents take on symbolic force. These are what Wordsworth called the ‘spots of time’ that shape our identity…Wordsworth was the first master-poet of memory” (31).