In your opinion, how successfully does Lyrical Ballads capture the hour of feeling?

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Love, now an universal birth

From heart to heart is stealing,

From earth to man, from man to earth,

It is the hour of feeling

In your opinion, how successfully does Lyrical Ballads capture “the hour of feeling”?

Lyrical Ballads has been called a poetic revolution, the true beginning, (In British poetry) of the literary, philosophical and artistic movement known as “Romanticism”. The Romantics were concerned with feeling. In his preface of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote that “all good poetry is a spontaneous overflow of feelings” The above passage is from Lines written at a small distance form my house whereby the poem very much centres on “it is the hour of feeling”. In this poem Wordsworth wants his sister to experience the blessed pervasiveness of this “one moment” which fifty years of reason cannot substitute for, in which he finds himself connected to the earth and mankind through love. I shall use the underlined statement as the definition for “the hour of feeling” and imminently discuss the success of the poets in accomplishing this in the Lyrical Ballads.        

                                                                                        

The Romantic Movement was a reaction to the classical literature of the Augustan age, which was classic, impersonal and formal, championing rationality as opposed to feelings and used a large number of literary clichés and overblown phrases. The readers of poetry in the eighteenth century were largely educated men with a classical upbringing who had been conditioned to reflect in verse. The acme of classical elegance would be Thomas Gray’s An elegy written in a Country Churchyard, it is the reflections of a man seated in a country churchyard, but nothing can conceal the fact that it is a series of solemn thoughts, marshaled in logical sequence and clearly infers a classical restrained background. The poem speaks of emotions but does not convey them.

Wordsworth asserted that “Poetry is passion: it is the history and science of feelings” and that the word “passion” is derived from a word that signifies suffering. Most of the characters in Lyrical Ballads are suffering.

Some characters suffer from the effects of the American and French Wars- Wordsworth stated that “The Female Vagrant” was in part inspired by watching a fleet prepare to sail to engage the French in 1793. Enclosures and irresolute Poor Laws led to the destitution of many agrarian workers, a situation outlined in “The Last of the Flock”. A lack of provision for the elderly (Simon Lee), the stigma of unmarried motherhood and the need for penal reform (The convict, The dungeon) – all shape the poems.                

Lyrical Ballads was very much inspired by real events and real people written “in a selection of language really used by men” making it identifiable and invocative to the readers who share the common plight with the characters in the poem; thus creating a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Mothers who have lost their children (which was a common phenomenon at the time due to famine and sickness) would respond emotionally to “We are Seven” and “The Thorn”; families who have lost their men to war, would sympathize with “the female vagrant” and to the readers who never experience those plights, they were given a deeper and emotional understanding to the suffering of others. However, the poems were not merely limited to minute observations of suffering, though these were written with “an ardent wish to promote the welfare of mankind”.

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The major traits of the Romantic Movement are well-represented by the poems. These include the primacy of feeling over reason (“it is the hour of feeling”); interest in the power of imagination (“I must think, do all I can”); the value of the insight of a child (‘we are Seven’, ‘Anecdote for Fathers’); and therefore also in the primary adult/child relationship, that with its mother (‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Thorn’); the value of Nature as a moral guide, healer, and fulfillment (‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘Lines written in Early Spring’,

‘The Tables Turned’); the goodness of the pastoral contrasted to ...

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