Nostalgia in Romantic Poetry

Paper Summary:

This paper argues that nostalgia in poetry can be considered a particular kind of literary device, through which it is possible to gain some degree of insight into the whole ideology on which the romantic movement was based. Through an analysis of the poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it looks at how the romantics mourn the fleeting nature of time and look back to the golden age of childhood - which can only be recaptured through nostalgia. It shows how nostalgia allows the poets the opportunity to not only recapture the past, but to manipulate and control it and how the nostalgia displayed in romantic poetry is, then, a tool of the intellect and a calculated attempt to make sense of a confused world of impressions and feelings, to bring order where previously there was only chaos.

From the Paper:

"Coleridge's is an extreme model of nostalgia. Casting his mind back to childhood, he finds that the child he once was is also indulging in nostalgic thoughts of a still deeper past; the past he may have experienced even before birth, on a far different plane. This is the blissful, innocent world which becomes the ideal for all present existence, and the child who can still recall it, and imaginatively re-inhabit that world through nostalgia becomes, to the romantic mind, like a visionary without language or the proper means of expressing his recollection."

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