The Role of Emotions in Wordsworth and Eliot
Anton Pokrivcak – Silvia Pokrivcakova – Agata Buda
DOI: 10.18355/XL.2016.09.01.127-134
Abstract
The paper deals with the role emotions play in the Romantic and Modernistic approach to art, especially in the work of William Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot. The first part discusses Wordsworth´s famous definition of poetry as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” as expressed in the Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads. Then the attention is paid to the analysis of Wordsworth´s poems - “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798” and The Prelude as examples of the author´s ontological aesthetics in which emotion determines the depth of lyrical subject´s involvement with nature – and with the nature of his own being.
The second part of the paper is concerned with the analysis of another crucial critical text regarding the role of emotions in art – T. S. Eliot´s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in which he stressed the principle of “depersonalisation”. His critical principles are discussed through the analysis of his masterwork The Waste Land.
Key words
emotion, Romanticism, Wordsworth, nature, T. S. Eliot, modernism
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