Poetic Education: Wordsworth, Yeats, Coleridge, Shelley

O'Neill, Michael

Poetic Education: Wordsworth, Yeats, Coleridge, Shelley

O'Neill, Michael

Authors

Michael O'Neill

Abstract

As they dramatize, implicitly or explicitly, the education involved in being a poet, Romantic poets meditate on what it is to know and to be free. Their meditations dwell in the light and shade cast by Schiller’s proposition in letter XV of Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man: “man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.” Play may be more apparent as a principle of poetic self-discovery in Coleridge and Shelley than in Wordsworth, and yet Wordsworth, too, insists upon the value of “idleness” (16) in a poem such as “Lines. Written at a Small Distance from My House …” (Gill ed.). All three poets exalt serious play as they recognize and react against the burden of often internalized cultural demands.

Citation

O'Neill, M. (2015). Poetic Education: Wordsworth, Yeats, Coleridge, Shelley. Wordsworth circle, 46(2), 79-86

Journal Article Type	Article
Publication Date	Mar 1, 2015
Deposit Date	Aug 25, 2015
Publicly Available Date	May 11, 2016
Journal	The Wordsworth circle.
Print ISSN	0043-8006
Publisher	New York University
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	46
Issue	2
Pages	79-86
Publisher URL	http://www.bu.edu/editinst/about/the-wordsworth-circle/