От песен невинности и опыта

Справедливо приветствуемая как одна из самых острых и оригинальных коллекций лирического стиха в английской поэзии, Песни Невинности и Песни Опыта содержат часть самого известного и самого доступного стиха Блэйка. Сопровождаемые рисунками , сделанными великолепной рукой Блэйка, эти два тома были напечатаны вместе впервые в 1794 (с заглавными песнями Невиновности и Опыта).

Радость, связанная с искренним видением вселенной, составляет состояние невинности, которую мужчины в их зрелости больше не в состоянии сохранить. Для Блэйка детство было символом государства души и было, поэтому, совершенно совместимо со зрелостью. Невинные концепции изменения действительности перед лицом опыта, Блэйк также стремится намекнуть на ключевую роль, которую играет опыт в развитии жизненной, творческой души. "Без обратного", он написал, "нет никакой Прогрессии. Если Человек должен вырасти, он должен достигнуть соглашения с более печальными аспектами жизни".

Под влиянием детских песен, баллад и гимнов, символический мир Песен Невинности - мир Библии и христианской пасторали, в то время как та из мастерски более зрелых Песен Опыта более личная и неуловимая. Варьируясь по форме и содержанию, короткие лирические стихи обоих томов ясно объединены общим дизайном, многими более поздними стихами, служащими, чтобы ответить на вопросы из более ранней коллекции.

William Wordsworth ( i770 - 1850)

Born in West Cumberland in 1770, Wordsworth’s happy childhood was spent growing up in the beautiful countryside of the English Lake District. After attending a local grammar school, he proceeded to Cambridge where he graduated without distinction in 1791. Attracted by the democratic ideals of the French revolution, he moved to France the same year and there cultivated his republican and liberal sympathies. During his stay he had a love affair with Annette Vallon, but a lack of financial means prevented him from marrying her, and he eventually returned to England. Annette bore him a daughter, Caroline, but Wordsworth was unable to rejoin them due to the outbreak of hostilities between England and France in 1793. The 'Terror' in France resulted in political disillusionment (and later outright political conservatism) while his separation from Annette and the daughter he had never seen provoked remorse and a severe bout of depression.

A period of convalescence spent in Dorsetshire with his beloved sister, Dorothy, led to philosophical reflections on the beneficial influence of nature. Some years later these meditations were to mature in dramatic form when Wordsworth, in conjunction with his friend and literary companion, Coleridge, published the highly polemical yet influential collection of poetry Lyrical Ballads (1798). In 1799 Wordsworth returned to settle in the Lake District with Dorothy and Coleridge: having inherited a substantial legacy of £ 9,000 in 1795, he was now able to devote himself entirely to writing poetry.

Additions to the Lyrical Ballads in 1799 were followed by the first draft of his lengthy autobiographical poem. The Prelude, six years later. In 1803 he had married an old school companion of his, Mary Hutchinson, and the marriage was to yield no less than five children.

Although most of his finest verse was written in the ten years following the publication of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth devoted himself to revising old works and writing new ones for the rest of his life. Formal recognition of his contribution to literature came seven years before his death in 1850 when he was appointed Poet Laureate.

Wordsworth's ideas concerning nature, the task of the poet and the nature of poetical composition have become a landmark in the history of English literature and much of his earlier verse is among the finest of the Romantic period. He became less innovative and more artistically conservative in his later years, his mature verse often proving artificial and too esoteric. Technically speaking, Wordsworth is extremely versatile and he was accomplished in a number of verse forms, ranging from blank verse, sonnets and odes to ballads and delightfully simple lyrics.

Wordsworth is frequently thought of as a 'nature poet’: his pantheistic philosophy led him to believe that men should enter into communion with nature. Since nature was an expression of God and was charged with his presence, he believed it constituted a potential moral guide for those possessed of a 'feeling heart". This reverence for nature went hand in hand with a sympathy for the state of childhood: in terms reminiscent of Blake, he equates childhood with innocence and a quality of imagination which has yet to be spoilt by the 'civilizing' tendencies of an adult, rational world. The child possesses an instinctive knowledge endowed with superior wisdom (‘The child is father to the man'), and the corruption of this in society is a source of real loss.

Wordsworth outlined his main principles concerning poetry in a long preface - hailed by some critics as the manifesto of the English Romantic movement - which he added to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads in 1800.

The main points are as follows:

The language of poetry was to consist of "a selection of language really used by man". In bringing his language closer to the everyday language of men, ‘poetic diction' - with its artful figures of speech and elevated tone - was to be avoided as much as possible.

The subject of poetry was to consist of "incidents and situations from common life". By this Wordsworth meant “humble, rustic life since under those conditions Man was in closer contact with nature, and in this simple state the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity".

Wordsworth, like Blake and the Romantic poets who succeeded them, attached great importance to the imagination. Over ordinary incidents, situations and objects the poet "throws a certain colouring of the imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect'. In the hands of the true poet, the imagination was the faculty whereby ordinary objects were in some way transformed to reveal aspects of their inner nature to which the mind is habitually blind.

For Wordsworth the memory was a key element in poetic composition. His famous and oft quoted premise that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" is clearly radical in its implications, but it should not be misunderstood as favouring the unrestrained outpouring of emotions. Indeed, the 'spontaneous overflow’ occurs at the moment of composition, but only after the feelings have been worked out through a carefully acquired process of prior thought: the feelings to which the poet gives formal body originate from 'emotion recollected in tranquility', that is, they are newly contemplated and organized in the poet's mind through the subjective experience of memory.

Wordsworth was instrumental in undermining the accepted eighteenth- century idea of the poet as a skilled craftsman versed in the dictates of socially acceptable artistic canons. The poet, he says, is "a man speaking to men", but he is also "a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind". The poet is possessed of a more than usual organic sensibility and his task is not simply to embellish everyday life, but to show other men the essence of things. In this critical sense he is an initiator and not an imitator of truths, a prophet-like figure who, having thought long and deeply about life and its mysteries, is responsible for conveying a new moral message.

Major works:

1792 - An Evening Walk, Descriptive Sketches;

1798 - Lyrical Ballads (2nd edition 1800), a collection of poems written in collaboration with Coleridge;

1798-1805 - The Prelude, published following the author's death in 1850, an autobiographical poem in 14 books;

1807 - Poems in Two Volumes;

1814. - The Excursion, a nine-book poem which Wordsworth had planned to publish as part of a long philosophical poem on God, nature and man.

1815. - Collected edition of his poems.