The Whole Deal with Romanticism

William Wordsworth is a very well known romantic poet. The elements associated with this genre are very present in the two poems that I plan to analyze for my final paper: "The World Is Too Much With Us" and "I Wandered
Lonely as a Cloud."

Yet, how did I recognize that these poems belonged in the genre of romanticism (aside from looking at the dates they were written in)? Well, this genre comes with some general characteristics that I was able to recognize and that helped me in understanding the themes of these poems and even discover some incompatibilities.

The Romantic Movement was a response to the Enlightenment, or the age of reason. Romanticism argued that emotion was more important than logical thought when interpreting the world around us. It therefore emphasized the natural world and the feelings that we derived from our interaction with it.



This influence is evident in "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud":

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

In this excerpt, the speaker's interaction with nature affects him in a way that if he ever feels despondent, he can think back on the feelings that arose in him when watching the daffodils dance to the wind. The speaker is clearly establishing the claim that he has a relationship with nature that affects his emotions and even perhaps his view of the world (as the daffodils are peacefully swooned by the wind aside from other events that may be happening in a busy world.) The daffodils seem to fill the speaker with tranquility. This is presented by the imagery embedded in the poem.

We also have evidence of this in "The World Is Too Much With Us":

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

In this latter part of the poem, the romantic ideals are evident as the speaker expresses his wish to be as a Pagan worshiper who worshipped nature. However, there is incongruence as one analyses the form of the poem. As a Petrarchan sonnet it is very structure, and in a sense is the antithesis of the poems theme and of the romantic genre. As a structure form of poetry, it is hard to move past the rigid character that this applies to the message, considering that romantic poetry is dedicated to promoting a more free form that mimics nature.

And so, I have found that as I took the genre into consideration I was able to discover an element of the poem which when analyzed contradicts the theme. This could help me support my claim which states that sometimes we lose the essence of a poem when we look too much into a specific literary element.

Do you think this could support my claim as well?