Wordsworth links

Hey all,
I've got a couple Wordsworth links here for your enjoyment. They are more analytical in nature, rather than biographical, but I figure that's helpful too.

This page has a number of links to articles and various other Wordsworth resources.
http://www.dmoz.org/Arts/Literature/Authors/W/Wordsworth,_William/

And this one is a short biography or Wordsworth:
http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Literary/Wordsworth.htm

In Light of Charlotte Smith...

Born May4 1749-Died October 28 1806

I can honestly say that I am not satisfied with the yielded results on Charlotte Smith seeing as how her sonnets were compared to Shakespeare and Milton. I did manage to find out that Smith had a very demanding life with plenty of struggling along the way. She married Benjamin Smith, an initially wealthy mean who lost the wealth and was put into prison where he left her with one of his illegitimate children (and some of their own). Eventually she moved into debtors prison with him. She wrote the novels to gain money for the family.

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For those of you looking further into Smith's work there is actually a fair amount of literary criticism on her if you look hard enough.
This article by Daniel Robinson gets more interesting and detailed about Smith's Elegiac Sonnets toward the middle. This is an interesting article looking into the melancholy and paradox of her poetry.
Oh! I just found this and it's very exciting....The British Women Romantic Poets Project at UC Davis. You can look up anyone, but if you look up Smith you can find some engraved picture copies of the title pages from the sonnets and more.
When you didn't think it could get anymore exciting there's this article on considering medical discourse and the problem of sensibility in Smith's sonnets. Apparently "Charlotte Smith’s representation of melancholia in her Elegiac Sonnets returns to the mid-eighteenth-century understanding of the illness, which portrayed the melancholic as a person of both sensibility
and rationality". Read on!
One last tidbit: This is a longer overview from Huntington Library Quarterly on Smith's life with a lot of focus on her struggles and all of the different types of literature she wrote including a comedic play, children's books, and anti-war poems.

Wordsworth Images

This is a link to a web site that shows different images of William Wordsworth spanning a number of years. It also gives a brief description of when each painting was done in relation to what he was writing at the time. This site also links back to further biographical information about Wordsworth.

http://members.aol.com/wordspage2/images.htm

Willliam Wordsworth

Although the point is debatable, the production of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads is considered by some as the beginning of the Romantic period. The end of the period is said to be around the mid 1800s, but it can be (and has been) argued that the Romantic period is continuing even today. The Lyrical Ballads turned away from the era's accepted topics of poetry, and moved toward a humanistic approach verging on existentialism--one argument of the continuation of the Romantic Period. The following is a great example:

The Tables Turned: an evening scene, on the same subject (by Wordsworth, composed probably 23 May 1798)

Up, up, my friend, and clear you looks!
Why all this toil and trouble?
Up, up my friend, and quit your books,
Or surely you’ll grow double!

The sun above the mountain’s head
A freshening luster mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! ‘tis a dull and endless strife;
Come hear the woodland linnet —
How sweet his music! On my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark, how blithe the throstle sings!
And he is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of things,
Let nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless —
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which nature brings,
Our meddling intellect
Misshapes the beauteous forms of things —
We murder to dissect.

Enough of science and of art,
Close up these barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Wordsworth's writings heavily influence "Western" literature. If you click here, this site provides many links to Romantic Literature: lectures, scholarly articles, readings and the like. In the section "Poets on Poets" you can hear recitations. Hearing the poems of Romantic Poets adds another dimension to their beauty. At the same site you can listen to Rachel Blau DuPlessis reading William Wordsworth's poem "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802"

Response #3: Smith, Wordsworth

Here is an excellent resource on Charlotte Smith that includes scholarly articles, images, and primary texts.