This document summarizes the major periods of English literature and provides details on William Wordsworth and the emergence of Romanticism. It outlines the periods from the Medieval era to modernism. Romanticism emerged in response to Neo-Classicism, with Wordsworth playing a key role. As a major Romantic poet, Wordsworth published works like The Prelude and served as Poet Laureate. He also wrote influential literary criticism in works like prefaces, arguing poetry should use common language to transmit ordinary experiences transformed by imagination.

2. SQUEEZE YOUR BRAINS!!
 List the periods/ages in English Literature.
 Medieval literature (1066-1510) Geoffrey Chaucer
 Renaissance and Reformation (1510-1620) Univ Wits, Shakes.,
 Revolution and Restoration (1620-1690) Metaphysical poets
 Neo-classicism (1690-1780) Defoe, Addison, Steele, etc
 Romantic period (1780-1830) Shelley, Keats, Byron, etc
 Late Victorian & Edwardian lit., (1830-1880) Dickens, Carlyle.,
 Modernism (1920-1945) Woolf, Richardson, Lawrence, etc…
 Post-war & Post-modernism (1950’s – present)
 What do you know about William Wordsworth? (Slide 5)
 How does Romanticism emerge? (Slide 3,4)

3.  Neo-Classicism insisted:
“Poetry imitated nature to delight and to
instruct and the poet must follow the rules
of the ancients”
 Dryden, Addison & Dr.Johnson– questioned all the
rules  did not stand for the ‘Test of Time’
 “Changes are always developments, they are never
complete severances”
 ROMANTICISM – the name to the new change

5. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
• Born: 7 April, 1770
• Died: 23 April, 1850
• A Major English Romantic Poet
• With S. T. Coleridge, launched
“ROMANTIC AGE”
• ‘Magnum Opus’  The Prelude
(A Semiautobiographical poem)
• Britain’s Poet Laureate :
From 1843 until his death in1850

6. William
Wordsworth
Manifesto of
English Romantic
Criticism

7. WORDSWORTH
AS A CRITIC
 Not by temperament & training
 ‘The Lyrical Ballads’ – 1798
 The preface (2nd edition) – 1800
 An Appendix – 1802
 An Essay Supplementary – 1815
 Literary criticism – demolishes old & faulty

8. 
 “…more permanent and a far more
philosophical language”

 Difference: not only in metre, but also in
the choice of words and phrases

9.  Disgusted by the “gaudiness and inane
phraseology” of many modern writers,
he castigates poets who,
“ separate themselves from the sympathies of
men,… to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle
appetites of their own creation”
 Simple in language:
“ language of common men…”

10. • Poetry is to give pleasure…
 Situations from everyday life:
– “The principal object: to choose incidents and situations from
common life,…”
 Selection of language:
– “In a selection of language really used by men…”
 Transformed by the poet’s imagination:
Ordinary events  VIVID & ATTRACTIVE
– “to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination…”
“ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an
unusual aspect”

11. *
*
*
*

12. 
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
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13. * ‘man speaking to men’
* ‘a man,… endowed with more lively sensibility,
more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a
greater knowledge of human nature, and a more
comprehensive soul’
*‘every great poet is a teacher; I wish either to be
considered as a teacher or as nothing…’
[Plato and Wordsworth has much in common]
* The idea of poetry  form of communication

14. Rene Wellek
“Wordsworth….in the history of criticism which must
be called ambiguous or transitional,…. he adopts a
theory of poetry, in which imagination holds the
central place”
“…Wordsworth left only a small body of criticism, it is
rich in survivals, suggestions, anticipations and
personal insights…”
“Wordsworth actually ends in good neo-classicism,
doth the same tale repeat,… in a selection of
language really used by men…”
says….