Wordsworth_Vs._Coleridge

Wordsworth Vs. Coleridge The Para and the Normal Romanticism was characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature: “an abundant imagery coinciding with an equally abundant quantity of natural objects, the theme of imagination linked closely to the theme of nature, such is the fundamental ambiguity that characterizes the poetics of romanticism” (de Man 66). Thus, as romantic literature everywhere developed, imagination was praised over reason, emotions over logic, and intuition over science—making way for a vast body of literature of great sensibility and passion. This literature emphasized a new flexibility of form adapted to varying content, encouraged the development of complex and fast-moving plots, and allowed mixed genres (tragicomedy and the mingling of the grotesque and the sublime) and freer style. The preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), by English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was of prime importance as a manifesto of literary romanticism. In Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria he recalls conversations with Wordsworth regarding “the two cardinal points of poetry: the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the wordsworth, nature, imagination, poem, supernatural, memory, wordsworth’s, lyrical, life, coleridge, ballads, abbey, world, ship, romanticism, reader, men, mariner, language, coleridge’s, wedding, tintern, power, place, past, over, mind, lines, first, day, childhood, albatross, years, while, things