Thursday, September 20, 2012
Wordsworth's emphasis on the individual experience
Wordsworth "On the Naming of Places" reads as an extension of turning these places from nature to painting to poetry with an added emphasis on the individual and their attachment to these spots. It's no longer an act of viewing nature and taking a physical representation with you to add to your collection or reading a collection of a traveler's analysis but instead attaching yourself or someone else to that spot. I enjoyed reading this collection of poems compared to Tuesdays readings because the tone was not melancholy and Wordsworth is collectively constructing these spots in nature through his poem but maintaining the importance of the personal experience compared to the methodical analysis of looking for the picturesque or sublime.
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I really enjoyed reading "On the Naming of Places" as well. These poems were a bit easier to follow and I liked how Wordsworth brought the scenes in his poem to life by telling us what they meant to him.
ReplyDeleteThe is absolutely true: Wordsworth does try to make the spots his own by naming them--spots that may, as he says in the Preface to this series of poems, already have names given to them by the people who have lived in the place. As a newcomer, Wordsworth is trying to attach himself to his new home, but he is still very upfront about the fact that he and his friends are leisured middle class people, not the laborers they hear working in the fields or the starving peasant they see on the beach. You can think about these poems as showing a process in which a tourist collecting views becomes "a local" by insinuating himself into and onto the landscape by imprinting his words on it (in poetry and physically on the rocks).
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