Word: wordsworths
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This prototype of the self-annihilating artist seems yet another casualty of the rock culture; in fact, Thomas Chatterton perished in a London garret in 1770. Pondering the tragedy, William Wordsworth labeled him "the marvellous boy," and Samuel Johnson burbled, "It is wonderful how the whelp has written such things." Not all the appraisal was so rhapsodic. Horace Walpole called Chatterton "an instance that a complete genius and a complete rogue can be formed before a man is of age." Genius because Chatterton's verses were so prodigious, rogue because the young poet once wrote in an archaic style, artificially...
...William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism" is one of those singular exhibitions that take you into the heart of a cultural moment, explore it in close detail and yet leave you eager for more. On view at the New York Public Library until Dec. 31, it has been jointly organized by Rutgers University and the Wordsworth Trust in England...
Quite apart from the fact that many of the ideals and the deepest nostalgias of American culture (such as the longing for moral examples within nature that is the root of the whole ecology movement) wind back to Wordsworth and his 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...
...through, the show carries the powerful conviction that the substance of Romantic thought was as much the invention of painters as of poets. Constable was Wordsworth's equal and ally, not his plagiarist, when he wrote that the light in his paintings "cannot be put out because it is the light of Nature -- the mother of all that is valuable in poetry, painting or anything else where an appeal to the soul is required." Natural vision, the sense of English terrain, exalted hopes of freedom, fear of the apocalyptic violence that lurked in human nature and, above all, a sense...
...universe's orderliness. Well, they have reckoned without the rain, mud and chill. Or the bull in a neighbor's field. Or the queenly ardor of Withnail's Uncle Monty (a sweetly mad Richard Griffiths), who turns up to pursue his hopeless passion for "and I." Somehow, Wordsworth failed to mention these inconveniences...