Words of Wisdom:


Abrams Romantic Poetry

  • Date Submitted: 11/29/2012 05:46 PM
  • Flesch-Kincaid Score: 56.2 
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In the Romantic genre of poetry, nature and thought are believed to be interchangeable and sustaining each other. The best Romantic poet meditates on a landscape where there is a transaction between the subject and the object brought upon by the thought, or nature itself. Mind and nature are brought together to produce a romantic poem where in the poet cannot make the distinction between his actual self and the thought or nature under lied in the poem. This is what makes the poetry an art, according to Romantic era poets, because it embodies a “transfusion and transmission of consciousness to identify [himself] with the Object” (693). These poets sometimes see nature and romanticism as something they are looking for or discovering that is already inside themselves and forever exists, but is not yet observed. English romantic poet William Wordsworth puts it as something that he “communes with” which is not apart from by inside his own “immaterial nature.” It is almost as if for many romantic era poets, they do not experience nature and the wilderness, but that nature such as mountains, waves, skies, and the rest of the surrounding universe becomes a part of them. The subject and object, or poet/reader and poem, are infused into one another and they partake in a coexisting relationship where they seem to become interchangeable. There could be a specific structure that is followed in these romantic poems, and that is exactly what Abrams believes. Abrams suggests that in romantic poetry where nature is the source for the poem, these poets follow a certain structure and style for their works.
In romantic poetry, there seems to be a respectable circular structure that starts with what the poet sees and how a problem he has can be solved with what he is looking at. Abrams argues that most romantic poetry follows a structure and that this is what it outlines: “[t]he speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes...



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