ENGL 497Senior Seminar
Prof. G. Steinberg
There are times when Wordsworth sounds a lot like Johnson, but Wordsworth's ideas are actually a radical departure from Johnson's. So, focus on what distinguishes Wordsworth from Johnson rather than on what they have in common.
Wordsworth is writing about poetry he himself wrote rather than about literature in general. But we can extrapolate a lot about what Wordsworth thinks about literature in general from what he says about his own poems. If he has chosen to write his own poetry a certain way, he presumably thinks that that's the best and proper way to write poetry. So, if we can figure out what Wordsworth thought he was doing in his own poems, we can get an idea of what he thinks literature should do generally.
Wordsworth, for example, says that all his poems had "a worthy purpose." How does Wordsworth's conceptualization of the purpose of literature differ from Johnson's? What does Wordsworth see as the purpose and subject of literature? What should literature be about? What kind of truth should be the object of literature's testimony?
Wordsworth also spends a lot of time talking about how literature is created by the writer. How does the writer create great literature, according to Wordsworth? Where does great literature come from? In what ways are great writers different from other people? In what ways should they be the same as everyone else?
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