ENGL 222 Lecture Notes - Tums
Document Summary
Book 1 introduces the poet"s childhood and upbringing to us. The first thing wordsworth does is talk about returning to his childhood home; regaling of hoe nature brings us back to our spiritual selves in juxtaposition to civilization"s dehumanizing effects. He goes on to compare this spirituality to his own creativity which he believes is met due to three aspects that allow creativity: A host of painstaking observations of natural phenomena. He concludes that he must trace these opinions from childhood to adulthood to answer this. He begins this trek by returning to childhood activities such as tree climbing and river bathing in which he concludes that for every childhood action, their should be a natural reaction to teach the child a lesson. A particularly colorful story includes his theft of a boat and the later connections to the idea of pantheism and the unity of life and spirit as well as the importance of nature in these matters.
