The Great World Of Joy And Pain

As the outstanding representative of the romanticism poetry, William Wordsworth's (1770-1785) works are always attracting the attention from the world of criticism.In my opinion, the tragedy feature of Wordsworth's works is mostly represented in the following four aspects:Firstly, there is lots of description of the tragic undergoing and experience of human beings in his works. Wordsworth's apprehension of tragedy is not restricted to the descriptions of becoming destitute and homeless or being abandoned to death, but it can also be felt in the experience and understanding of life itself. Nature arouses human's pondering and sublimates human's suffering. Therefore, a person's tragic experiencing transforms to the background of his thoughts and the nourishment of his growth. Furthermore, it even upgrades human being's cognition of suffering itself.Secondly, as for the representing objects and describing content, Wordsworth extends the material which is used to constitute the tragedy of poems. He describes the living of populace, the utterances of populace and the characteristics and affections of the populace in his poems and uses all those to mold the buskin and that of his dramatis personae's. At the same time, the poet prefers trifles rather than events in his poems but provides the odds and ends with awfulness in many of his works.Thirdly, although the format of Wordsworth's poems is lyric, including its words, plot, setting and images, it embodies the grandness of tragedy indeed. Wordsworth often poetizes with the selected words and expressions from ordinary conversations, which consist of his brief perfect language style and calm depiction style. He blurs the space and the time in his narration, which lacks the typical definition and signs of space and time, or the label significance of the concrete space and time to the occurrences. He creates picturesque scenes to imply the poetic connotation, which is more effective to exalt the grandeur of his poems than the direct statement. And he uses simple images to take the place of the story details or pays regard to the encounters and psychological changes of the characters.Fourthly,Wordsworth's works not only transcends the superficial pattern of the common lyrics in his time but also breaks through the restriction of his own thoughts through the atmosphere and grandeur of his lyrics and the profound of the human being's tragic experience. He is able to upgrade the misfortune of an individual to the general condition of human's life, neither in terms of the reportage to simply record the tribulation nor reveling in expressing himself or giving sermons, consequently degrading the trait of poetry itself.As one of the most outstanding romanticism poets, Wordsworth, like all the other great romanticism poets, believes that the image is a very important technique. In his practical writing, he composes a connotational poetic realm full of various mournful, sentimental, miserable and dignified images. Take his poem《the Thorn》as an example, the effect of images on the artistic conception and the poetic atmosphere can be reached through the following facets: First, the repetition of an image -- the poet repeats the same word or sentence in order to build up some feeling, and such repetition acquires the successive increase of their meaning and the implicative effect of foreshadowing; while besides the images in the poem, the relater himself also enhances the poem's suspense and artistic conception through repetition. Second, the interaction and association between the images -- the poet applies a lot of metaphor among different objects or contrast the both aspects of the same object. Third, the extent of the meaning of the images– through the exaggeration and repetition of a series of images and the sublimation of the imagination, the connotation of the images gradually becomes complex and complicated, at the same time, the direction of the images becomes vague, too. However, that causes the poems full of artistic conception and expressive force.In addition to the construction of the atmosphere of the poems and the sublimation of the artistic appreciation, the images also attach themselves to the upbuilding of the poetic structure. This function can be demonstrated by two factors. On one hand, images interlude, advance and complement with other elements, which improve the impression of the poetry as a whole so that the structure of the poetry is more complete and solid. In other words, the images and other elements are interluded, advanced and complemented each other. That is the comments conceal the images into a'system of symbols'while the images strengthen the comments impowering their persuasion and the images guide the development of the poetry while comments are the token of the fact. On the other hand,the image is the drive and power of the development of poetry, contributing directly to the forming of the structure of the poetry. Namely, images are not just the proof of the rhetorical means of the poetry, which often undertakes abstract words to express. When a poem is developed by one or several central images, they are the real focus of the poem leading the development of it.As an idealist, Wordsworth not only believes that poetry can cover all and contain everything, but also tries to reestablish a new"nature"in his poetry to hold his own ideal and imagination of the world. With his further understanding of the pain and the glee of life, the poet's concern on the nature turns more and more to"The still,sad music of humanity"and the union of the consciousness of one soul and all the other things– the sky, the ocean, the green land and his own spirit. Through all his works, we could easily see that Wordsworth's most important criterion to evaluate the poetry is nature. But the nature he refers has three primary meanings: First, nature is the least common denominator of human nature. It is mainly embodied by the human nature itself which is edified by the nature and the human beings themselves who grow up in the nature. Secondly, nature is truly represented by the human beings who live in the light of nature (In another word, they live in the primary cultural environment esp. in the countryside). As the natural human, some of them are absolutely far away from the attaint of civilization and some, although somewhat disgraced by the civilization, ruin with the dignity of the son of the nature. They devote their lives but earn bless. Thirdly, nature mostly includes the simple idea and emotions and the natural unmannered way to express them. That is the outpouring of emotions must be natural. Wordsworth neither intentionally seeks the ordinary words to deliver emotions nor deliberately distorts the language to go for the poetic impression. He adopts many poetic patterns freely to express his natural feelings, such as Blank Verse, Ballad and Sonnet.Wordsworth is always trying to rectify the formulized, rigid, previous ideas about the art of poetry, so he emphasizes the relative element -- nature. The theory is the poet's effective hypothesis, who is so distinguished and initiative, and he uses it to direct his practice of poetizing. His imagination of nature may be a kind of illusion, however, while he writes down what he imagines, he penetrates into the covert of human nature, exploring various experiences. Those affective tragic poesies, to some extent, not only even go beyond the limitation of the poet's thinking but also exceed the era in which they were born, with the value of surpassing their historical phase and not being enslaved to the historical linguistic circumstance -- like all the remarkable poems, their golden quality brings the poet supreme fame in the tradition of literature as well as puts much value on the discussion of the literature criticism on such aspects as the art form, the representation themes, the spirit connotation and so on.