![]() And it seems to me that it’s also a structure to a large extent implicitly present in Wordsworth, especially in The Prelude. The point is that it’s a primal, mythic pattern. You can see it as Beginning, Middle, and End. You can see it as well in the round of the seasons (starting with summer and ending with spring) you can see it in the pattern of human aging, from juvenile innocence, to adolescent or post-adolescent alienated experience, to a mature harmonising of both. Imagine it as a pattern of (implied) Golden Age, then Fall, then Redemption and/or Apocalypse phrased that way, it’s the pattern of the Christian Bible, from Genesis to Revelations. I think this sequence is, as a structure, not unique to fantasy. Tolkien.Ĭlute and Grant, in their definition of “fantasy,” argue that “the greatest fantasy writers … almost invariably engage deeply with the transformative potentials of fantasy.” More specifically: “A fantasy text may be described as the story of an earned passage from bondage - via a central recognition of what has been revealed and of what is about to happen, and which may involve a profound metamorphosis of protagonist or world (or both) - into the eucatastrophe, where marriages may occur, just governance fertilize the barren land, and there is a healing.” And with all that will come some ideas from J.R.R. Abrams’ excellent critical study of Romanticism, Natural Supernaturalism. Before doing that, though, I want to introduce some more concepts from the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, and then bring in some ideas from M.H. The notion of “thinning,” the fading of enchantment and meaning, seems to resonate with Wordsworth’s poetry as well.īearing all this in mind, I want to look here at perhaps Wordsworth’s greatest accomplishment, The Prelude, his epic poem on the growth of his own mind. Comparing his work to the motifs of fantasy fiction in Clute and Grant’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy, I found parallels between his use of nature and the way “the Land” has been imagined in secondary-world fantasy. Still, I find there’s a fantastic feel that emerges from the use of certain structures and imagery. I wrote about the work of William Blake here, and last time I began a consideration of fantasy elements in the work of William Wordsworth.Īs I said then, Wordsworth is not a writer with many overt fantastic elements in his major works. Wordsworth romanticism series#The series began with this introductory post, continued with an overview of the neo-classical eighteenth century that the Romantics revolted against, considered the Romantic themes in English writing from 1760 to about 1790, then looked at elements of fantasy and Romanticism in France and Germany before returning to England to consider the Gothic. This post is part of an ongoing series about fantasy and the literary movement called Romanticism, specifically, English Romanticism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ![]()
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