Word: tintern
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...fellow poets, one cannot help feeling reverence at the sight of the manuscripts ranked in their vitrines. How often do you get to see Shelley's rough draft of "Ozymandias" or holograph manuscripts of Keats' "To Autumn," Byron's Don Juan, Burns' "Auld Lang Syne" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" in one room at once? But the curators have also assembled an extraordinary range of paintings, drawings and prints to show what effect the new current of natural vision, directed toward subjects both common and sublime, had on English artists -- how it was refracted and amplified in their work...
Turner and Constable, of course, dominate. It will be some time before the U.S. sees a finer group of Turner watercolors than those assembled for the show. They cover all the phases of his work, from early picturesque scenes of ruins such as Tintern Abbey through the grandly managed complexities of his Alpine views with every pebble and wreath of mist in place, like The Passage of the St. Gothard, 1804, to the mists and chromatic blooms of his amazingly modern late watercolors...
...been said that "when Wordsworth's inferior work has been pruned away, only a half dozen first-rate poems remain. Arnold in his selection found 312 pages of first-rate poetry; Housman finds only 129 pages. Included in his selections are the Ode on Intimations of Immortality, Tintern Abbey, Michael, the best episode from The Prelude, a few narrative poems and a swatch of lyrics, 14 of Wordsworth's grand total of nearly 150 sonnets (some of which Housman considers greater than Milton's). All the Lucy poems are included. From one of them Editor Housman invites...
...with Professor Herbert Reed, for example, Annette Vallon was the all-sufficient reason while others have averred that it was Wordsworth's adoption of Tory principles after his disgust with the French Revolution due to the invasion of Switzerland. "The Ecclesiastical Sonnets" are indeed sorry stuff after the "Tintern Abbey," the "Prelude" and the "Ode on Intimations of Immortality." "In fact," as a CRIMSON editor of yore once wrote, "most of Wordsworth's later poems written while he was a stamp-distributor or laureate have to be taken by us moderns with a bromo-seltzer!" This is a just criticism...
Behind this mask, Mr. Read finds to his almost gleeful surprise, a suppressed soul. So long as his love for Annette burned in his spirit, he could write such great poems as "Tintern Abbey". But the fog of British respectability soon clouded this source of poetic feeling, and after ten short years the fire went out for lack of fuel and encouragement. After that there is nothing. As long as Annette lived he was that poet of "reality" but one his love for her died he saw things only through the smoked glasses of conventionality. From that time...