I also took creative liberties to add a farmer looking over his flowers in the bottom left of the illustration. I felt this was an important inclusion considering Wordsworth’s understanding of a poet, who has the unique “ability of conjuring up in himself passions” more realistic than what “other men are accustomed to feel in themselves” (Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads 92, 97). This interpretation implies that a poet’s role, one honed “from practice,” is a skilled trade or livelihood (Preface 98). He cultivates a connection to beauty for his reader, similar to a farmer cultivates his crop for his consumers. Therefore, the farmer tending to his crop represents the poet tending to and improving his expression of real events. By drawing from Wordsworth texts to illustrate his beautiful poem, I grasped a new understanding of the poet’s relationship to their art and their reader that contrasts with Keats’s ideas. In a Wordsworthian environment, poetry is a product very natural and fundamental (like a farmer’s crops), and the poet shapes it into something special and crucial to our development. The bystander and the art are unable to communicate with each other because the former is unintelligent about their sensibilities. The poet must be an active agent in conjuring and converting their expressions in a template appreciable by the reader.
William Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” has a notable scene in which the narrator stumbles upon “a host, of golden daffodils” (4). This image seeks to illustrate this flower field using the oil pastel medium, attempting to represent these flowers’ “dancing” in a “never-ending line” (6, 9). The poem encapsulates the happiness that the poet felt upon first seeing the scene, and again when the poet recalls the nostalgic memory retrospectively. Wordsworth sees the latter effect of beauty as stronger than the former because he does not know the “wealth” of beauty in the moment (18). He understands poetry in general as a resistance to the “uniformity” that “blunt[s] the discriminating powers of the mind” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads). Drawing from both his poem and his poetic purpose, I sought a way to represent this departure from worldly hindrances. To emphasize the memory’s almost dreamy reminiscence as it appears in his mind, I used a more abstracted vision of the flowers with oil pastels. Like the poem itself, my interpretation rests on the impressions associated with the flowers, like “pleasure,” not the perfect rendering of the flowers themselves (23).
I also took creative liberties to add a farmer looking over his flowers in the bottom left of the illustration. I felt this was an important inclusion considering Wordsworth’s understanding of a poet, who has the unique “ability of conjuring up in himself passions” more realistic than what “other men are accustomed to feel in themselves” (Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads 92, 97). This interpretation implies that a poet’s role, one honed “from practice,” is a skilled trade or livelihood (Preface 98). He cultivates a connection to beauty for his reader, similar to a farmer cultivates his crop for his consumers. Therefore, the farmer tending to his crop represents the poet tending to and improving his expression of real events. By drawing from Wordsworth texts to illustrate his beautiful poem, I grasped a new understanding of the poet’s relationship to their art and their reader that contrasts with Keats’s ideas. In a Wordsworthian environment, poetry is a product very natural and fundamental (like a farmer’s crops), and the poet shapes it into something special and crucial to our development. The bystander and the art are unable to communicate with each other because the former is unintelligent about their sensibilities. The poet must be an active agent in conjuring and converting their expressions in a template appreciable by the reader.
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