Date of Award
4-1-1974
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
English
First Advisor
Dr. Ralph M. Wardle
Abstract
William Wordsworth is best known as a poet of Nature, a painter of verbal landscapes glorifying clouds, flowers, trees, lakes, and mountains. And as a contemporaneous review of one of his works notes, “In his poetry, nothing in Nature is dead.” The Wordsworthian landscape is alive with the motion of winds, rivers, and vapors and of mountains which seemed to rise up majestically before the viewers eyes. Whether he is viewing a panoramic scene of lakes and mountains or observing “the meanest flower that blows,” Wordsworth exhibits an acute awareness of motion. The motion may be unobtrusive as a whip of smoke rising from a cottage chimney in an otherwise static setting or it may pervade every element of a scene, but Wordsworth’s poetry contains few descriptions of Nature in which some kind of motion is not present.
Recommended Citation
James, Eleanor J., "Patterns of motion in Wordsworth's "Prelude"" (1974). Student Work. 3211.
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/studentwork/3211
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Comments
A Thesis Presented to the Department of English and the Faculty of the Graduate College University of Nebraska In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts University of Nebraska at Omaha. Copyright 1974 Eleanor J. James.