Saturday, August 2, 2014

Explain Wordsworth's concept of the imagination.

In Wordsworth's work, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798" there is abundant life, feeling and emotion as well as imagination.


His concept of imagination, the subject of the question posed, is present in the entire work, but especially from stanza 2 onward.


His own explanation of this concept seems to be encapsulated in the following lines:



And I have felt


...


In Wordsworth's work, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798" there is abundant life, feeling and emotion as well as imagination.


His concept of imagination, the subject of the question posed, is present in the entire work, but especially from stanza 2 onward.


His own explanation of this concept seems to be encapsulated in the following lines:



And I have felt


A presence that disturbs me with the joy


Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime


Of something far more deeply interfused,


Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,


And the round ocean and the living air,


And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:


A motion and a spirit, that impels


All thinking things, all objects of all thought,


And rolls through all things.




This idea of a presence in the mind of man that permeates all experience is, in Wordsworth's own words, his concept of imagination.


A gift of the intellect that has brought him back, in good times as well as bad, to this scene in the years since his first visit, and that will continue to do so in his later years after this.

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