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William WordsworthA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
On its face, “A Complaint” hardly seems revolutionary. Indeed, for a contemporary reader, Wordsworth’s plaint about a profound love that is now gone looks like conventional poetry; read aloud with its careful rhythm and dutiful rhymes, it scans like a conventional poem. Given its ornate and clever metaphors that fuse a fountain with a well, and given its elegant syntax, it even reads like conventional poetry. The poem also explores the complicated emotional trauma of a hypersensitive poet willing to lay bare the most intimate of his emotions.
The emotional aspect of the poem, however, is exactly what makes the poem revolutionary. For a contemporary reader, that a poem shares the innermost emotions of the poet seems conventional. At the time of its publication, however, the poem epitomized a sea-change in the cultural perception of poetry and its function, a radical upending of more than a century of principles that had shaped what was for the British people the very essence of their cultural identity. This was not a sage poet handing down wisdom or delighting in lampooning humanity’s foible with snarky irony and cutting wit.
By William Wordsworth
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
William Wordsworth
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
William Wordsworth
Daffodils
William Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...
William Wordsworth
London, 1802
William Wordsworth
Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
My Heart Leaps Up
William Wordsworth
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
William Wordsworth
Preface to Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways
William Wordsworth
She Was a Phantom of Delight
William Wordsworth
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
The Solitary Reaper
William Wordsworth
The World Is Too Much with Us
William Wordsworth
To the Skylark
William Wordsworth
We Are Seven
William Wordsworth