And like Milton, his sentences can sprawl over long chunks of a page, to explore all the nooks and crannies of his emerging thoughts. Always moving. Hes absorbed the techniques of Shakespeare and Milton, two poets that he knew inside out and revered, and he was very consciously following in their footsteps, particularly Miltons. So after Wordsworth, it feels like it would be a natural step for our next episode to look at Wordsworths great friend and the co-author of Lyrical Ballads, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. And all of these things stimulate the senses and also the emotions and eventually memories and daydreams, and if youre really lucky, moments of clarity and insight. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman. Therefore am I stillA lover of the meadows and the woods,And mountains; and of all that we beholdFrom this green earth; of all the mighty worldOf eye and ear, both what they half-create,And what perceive; well pleased to recognizeIn nature and the language of the sense,The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soulOf all my moral being. Following the events of Marvels Wolverine: The Long Night, Logan (Richard Armitage) returns to New Orleans in search of redemption, only to discover that his ex-lover, Maureen is nowhere to be found. So a shortish poem where we reflect on our own experience, our thoughts, our feelings, our relationships, our hopes and fears and loves and hates and so on. And what are these gifts? Right at the start of the poem hes walking through a landscape and looking at its beauty and its triggering memories and thoughts, in this case his memory of walking the same route five years previously, as well as Thoughts of more deep seclusion. And of course, thats not what he would have been told in church, where they would have recommended a different guide for his moral being. Not for thisFaint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other giftsHave followed, for such loss, I would believe,Abundant recompense. But the sublime isnt just beauty, its a sense of awe combined with beauty. Because sublime is a really important word for Romantic poets. And she's not the only one. Marvels Wolverine: The Lost Trail is an epic quest that takes place in the Louisiana bayou. So this was the tradition Wordsworth and Coleridge were attempting to tap into, with a somewhat more refined, literary take on ballads and songs and stories, including Coleridges masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Because this kind of poetry is really the default mode of poetry that we have pretty much to this day a relatively short poem I mean Tintern Abbey does go on for several pages, but its still short relative to the Odyssey and Paradise Lost and King Lear. And I dont think we need to sugarcoat that or avoid it. Its not as dramatic or intense as Shakespeare nor as sinuous and convoluted as Milton. Now is is coming back to face his greatest fears and search for answers. The poet starts off describing his walk in the country and his thoughts and feelings as he goes, so its me, me, me, up to a point. So hes saying that there is actually a moral payoff for the vision, it is salutary and self improving to be exposed to nature and to contemplate the sublime. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app. So at the same time as youre walking through the countryside, the physical landscape, youre walking through your own memory, your thoughts, and your feelings about those thoughts your own self. So this immanent, all pervasive, deeply interfused divinity was considered incompatible with the transcendent divinity of 18th century Christianity, the idea that God is completely independent of the material universe. So first of all, lets notice how closely intertwined the natural landscape is with Wordsworths thoughts and feelings: when he describes the waterfall, he doesnt say The sounding cataract / Fell from the tall rocks, he says The sounding cataract / Haunted me like a passion. But beyond that point, he ends up producing something that wouldnt look too out of place if we inserted it into the Sermon on the Mount or the Bhagavad Gita: So if we wanted to find a justification for the egotistical sublime, and lets face it, we dont have to, we can just enjoy the poetry. Because one problem Wordsworth faced was that he had a genius for describing his own inner life, his thoughts and feelings and memories, which could easily tip over into self-obsession and self-regard. He claimed to have written it entirely in his head, while he was walking back from Tintern Abbey to Bristol, my current home town, and wrote it down when he arrived in Bristol. Review our, A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness. The wonderful but also the challenging thing about mysticism, the direct apprehension of a sacred reality, is that it is literally the experience that cannot be put into words. WNYC, New York Public Radio, brings you Soundcheck, the arts and culture program hosted by John Schaefer, who engages guests and listeners in lively, inquisitive conversations with established and rising figures in New York City's creative arts scene. And in fairness, I dont think Wordsworth would have had a definite theological or philosophical position in mind, and nor should we expect a poem to provide one. Ryan Jennings ran from the horrors of Crayton 18 years ago. Even now, on the increasingly rare occasions that you find poetry reviewed or discussed in the mainstream press, at least in the UK, then quite often the journalist wont say much about the actual poetry but they are quite likely to praise any sign of raw emotion as a sign of authenticity, and this is still very much in the tradition that Wordsworth and his peers began. And then we get this absolutely extraordinary passage: And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf 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 impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things. He famously said that a poet should be a man speaking to men; in other words they should get down from their pedestal, and instead of writing in high-flown poetic diction, they should aim to express our elementary feelings by talking about down-to-earth subjects with characters and images drawn from everyday experience. Is it the person I, in inverted commas, am now, looking back at my younger self? Its feels steadier and more dependable. So he says that other gifts / Have followed and provide abundant recompense for his loss. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. And this is very characteristically Wordsworthian, as is the fact that the poem gives us a dual perspective on Wordsworths life, as the older poet looks back at his younger self: I cannot paintWhat then I was. Wordsworth and Coleridge set out their stall with the title, Lyrical Ballads, which alludes to the ballad tradition which you may recall we looked at back in Episode 22, with the anonymous ballad The Unquiet Grave. But lets face it, thats not what the poem says. Sometimes funny. John Keats famously said Wordsworth was an example of the egotistical sublime, which you could see as a bit of a backhanded compliment or maybe a criticism with a bit of appreciation in it. You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email. Not for thisFaint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other giftsHave followed, for such loss, I would believe,Abundant recompense. And here hes being absolutely true to the mystical experience. And hes got there through a very subtle and winding path, starting with the interplay of the landscape and his inner world as he walks through the countryside, then confronting the issue of loss and sadness, and the desire for some kind of recompense, and then suddenly we are in the presence of: A presence that disturbs me with the joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused. But he never tells us exactly what this something is. And by all accounts, Wordsworth did not avoid this temptation; particularly later in life, when he was lauded by all and sundry, he was criticised for excessive pride in his own achievements. And so moving on to Wordsworth, his is a very mature form of blank verse. Their composers or singers were often illiterate and anonymous, and the ballads were basically public property. And I think we can see why Wordsworth was attacked at the time for pantheism, the idea that God or the divine are identical with the physical reality of the universe around us. The poems full title is Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798. on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798. This is the Real School of Rock! So before we bid a fond farewell to blank verse, lets just pause and have another look over the countryside we have just traversed, in the company of William Wordsworth. But whereas Dante experienced his vision by soaring off into the sky, Wordsworth finds his by walking among the hills and rivers of the Wye Valley. At the start of the earliest version of The Prelude, he describes the Derwent as the fairest of all rivers, that loved / To blend his murmurs with my nurses song. My Beautiful Comrade from the North by Matthew Caley. The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. So in the 18th, English poetry had become more and more ornate, archaic, artificial and conventional, full of witty turns of phrase and clever classical allusions. His blank verse in particular feels like an extended ramble, where he often starts off by describing the sights and sounds of the natural world around him, and then before long hes describing the memories and thoughts and feelings that arise in him as he walks. And I think in this portrayal of the walking experience, Wordsworth is very accurate. And of course it would be possible, and I think the later Wordsworth was tempted to do this, to translate the Wordsworthian something as God, to try to bring Tintern Abbey safely within the bounds of conventional Christian thought. Or was the younger self the real me? With Weapon X in close pursuit, Logan and Marcus must team up and Scheer Intelligence features thoughtful and provocative conversations with "American Originals" -- people who, through a lifetime of engagement with political issues, offer unique and often surprising perspectives on the day's most important issues. He says I cannot paint / What then I was, emphasising the distance between the two selves. Then Shakespeare mixed it up so that phrases would often start in the middle of lines and spill over using enjambment from one line to another. And of course, poets have worried at this problem over the centuries and theyve made various attempts to find words for their experience, and I think Wordsworth has got as close as anyone to the heart of the matter. But if we wanted to, this I think, is where we would find it. And he says the mystery may be solved by the fact that Wordsworth was such a vigorous walker, that a few miles could have been as many as fifteen miles further up the Wye valley, where the landscape is much more rugged. When these poets describe natural beauty as sublime, this distinguishes it from the merely picturesque, which is a very 18th century concept: the idea that nature is pretty and ornamental, scenery to be admired and painted and framed decoratively for our appreciation. So he takes full advantage of enjambment, and of pauses in the middle of the line, of varying the metrical pattern for expressive effect. 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