A Little Pre-Analysis

Using this technique to get a better feel for the direction my paper is taking is a bit ironic considering the fact that I am evaluating the effectiveness of analysis as applied to the understanding of the theme. I suppose, though, that I do need to qualify what I think works and doesn't work! Anyhow, I decided to proceed by loosely analyzing "The World Is Too Much With Us," one of the two poems I plan to use to support my thesis. Here is a picture of my product:

So I found a couple of elements and decided to see what function they had on the piece:

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.

When Do We Go Too Far?

I have begun reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley as part of my personal reading. I read part of this novel a couple of years ago, and though I had enjoyed it, I never finished it. The reason why Frankenstein caught my attention is because I kept thinking about my thesis for an upcoming English paper, dealing with going too far into analyzing poetry so that it ends up losing its meaning, or one is "murdering to dissect" as William Wordsworth once said. Somehow this translated into remembering how Dr. Frankenstein violated the laws of science as he pursued knowledge that was beyond his grasp and obsessing with creating life.

Of course, this ends up haunting him when he creates The Monster, who seeks revenge for the injustices he felt Dr. Frankenstein had committed towards him.

In a sense, this Gothic novel, part of the Romantic movement, which Wordsworth is known for initiating, mimics Wordsworth's thoughts. In a sense I feel like both Mary Shelley and Wordsworth opposed the Enlightenment movement that preceded them by hinting at the dangers of viewing human nature as science and of not considering the whole. They both seem to share the idea that nature should be regarded by the relationship that is felt between humans and their environment, rather than treating this through rational thought.