A brief analysis of the contributions of Wordsworth (Preface to the Lyrical Ballads), Coleridge (Biographia Literaria) and Shelley (A Defence of Poetry) on English Literature

MEG – 05: Literary Criticism & Theory

ASSIGNMENT 2019 - 2020

                                                                          Max. Marks: 100

2. Attempt a brief analysis of the contributions of Wordsworth (Preface to the Lyrical Ballads), Coleridge (Biographia Literaria) and Shelley (A Defence of Poetry) on English Literature?

Answer.: Much before William Wordsworth started writing, the early Romantic poets like James Thomson (1700-48),Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74),Thomas Chatterton (1752-70),Thomas Gray (1716-71),William Collins-59),William Cowper (1731- 1800),George Crabbe (1754- 1832),Robert Burns (1759-95), and William Blake (1757-1827) deviated from the neo-classic insistence on rules. Wordsworth is perhaps the only romantic poet who made his poetic experiences the locus of his critical discourse. Unlike Coleridge, he was not a theorist. Instead he unravelled before us the workings of the mind of the poet, and therefore, Wordsworth’s literary criticism ceases to be criticism in its most literal sense. It comes out as the matrix where the poet’s mind generates emotions and feelings with that much of intensity and passion required for transmitting them into poetic experience which forms the basis of poetic composition. From this perspective, Wordsworth’s Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800 can be seen as a poetic "manifesto," or “statement of revolutionary aims.”

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