William Wordsworth: Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
Romanticism was a movement, stem from Europe in the late 18th century. This movement made a huge impact on the various branches of art, such as painting, music, dance, but most importantly on literature. The key figures of romanticism in English Literature were: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. The turning point in literary history was in 1789 when Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems which was a revolution in English poetic style. The important aspects during the composition of these poems were that the incidents and agents had to be supernatural and that the subjects had to be chosen from ordinary life. The closing poem in Lyrical Ballads is William Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.
The poem is also referred to just as Tintern Abbey, which can be misleading since the poem does not actually take place in the abbey. The poem starts with the poet himself. We discover that the poet has been there before and that already five years has passed since he last visited this place: „ Five years have passed; five summers, with the length/ Of five long winters! and again I hear/ These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs”. The rolling water in Tintern Abbey also refers to the form of the poem. We can find enjambment in this poem, which means that the meaning runs over from one poetic line to