Frey, O: "Emotion recollected in tranquillity" - Wordsworth'

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Vienna (Anglistik & Amerikanistik), course: Introductory Seminar / Literature - Romanticism, 15 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: "[P]oetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," William Wordsworth declares twice in his "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads (242, 250). When reading this statement, one might have the impression that, from his point of view, poetic composition is solely based on the expression of emotions, excluding any reasoning or reflection about them. Of course, as he is a poet of the Romantic period, sensibility plays a significant role in his theoretical works, as well as in his poetry. However, it has to be taken into account that Wordsworth thoroughly qualifies both occurrences of this declaration: on the one hand, he explains that "poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply" ("Preface" 242). On the other hand, he adds that poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated [...] [and] is qualified [...]" (250). Thus, despite the fact that emotions form the basis and the subject of poetry, the composition of a poem requires the interplay of certain intellectual powers, particularly the memory, contemplation and imaginative shaping of emotions.In this context, it is worth examining how Wordsworth actually turns his concept of poetic creation into a concrete poetic act. For this purpose, his poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" serves as an illustrative example, because here, the poetic process is not only traced on the level of surface content and on the level of discourse, but also in the emotional development of the lyrical I, who speaks as a po