William Wordsworth Group

Question:

dhrubo
dhrubo
Student
College - Senior

Can you please give me some critical comments on 'TINTERN ABBEY'?

I WANT TO KNOW THE CRITICAL OPINIONS OF SOME OF THE WELL KNOWN CRITICS.

Rate question:

Posted by dhrubo on Friday October 16, 2009 at 12:02 AM and tagged with critical comments on tintern abbey, harold bloom, judith page, magill, pater.

Answers:

  1. lit24
    lit24 Teacher
    Doctorate

    eNotes Editor

    Here are the learned and perspicacious critical opinions of some important critics on Wordsworth's “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (July 1798).”

    1. Charles Burney (1757-1817) once complained that the poem was "tinctured with gloomy, narrow, and unsociable ideas of seclusion from the commerce of the world: as if men were born to live in the woods and wilds, unconnected with each other!"

    2.  H. Pater (1839-1894):  “his [Wordsworth's] sense of man’s dim, potential powers became a pledge to him, indeed, of a future life; but carried him back also to that mysterious notion of an earlier state of existence.”

    3.  Harold Bloom (b.1930): Bloom in his The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, 1971, emphasizes  the "nakedness" of Wordsworth's poetry in this poem, that is, unlike most of Wordsworth's earlier poetry there is no intermediary like myths or legends between the poet and his world:  “the poet loves Nature for its own sake alone, and the presence of Nature gives beauty to the poet’s mind, again only for the mind’s sake.”

    4. Geoffrey H. Hartman (b.1929) in his book Wordsworth’s Poetry: 1787-1814 feels that Wordsworth had his own doubts about the consoling and restorative powers of Nature: “the voice we hear is full of haltings, of inner falls. It is the voice of a man who has been separated from the hope he affirms and who balances it in the movement against the possibility of further separation.”

    5. Frank N. Magill considers Wordsworth's poem as "a romantic return to nature, the search for the beautiful and permanent forms which incorporate primitive human goodness" (Magill 1992).

    6. Judith Page (currently Professor at the University of Florida, and an eminent feminist critic on the Romantics) says,that Wordsworth sees a re-birth of himself in Dorothy's eyes: "Wordsworth endorsed the developing ideology of womanhood based on notions of female purity and spirituality played out in the domestic sphere" (1990).

    Rate answer:

    Posted by lit24 on Friday October 16, 2009 at 7:47 AM