Category Archives: Wordsworth and Zen

Splendor in the Grass

Posted on October 10, 2020 by Vajragoni

This blog calls for special introductory material. Wordsworth himself wrote concerning his Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood: read more

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A Gathering of Leeches

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Vajragoni

Wordsworth’s poem Resolution and Independence does not utilize nature as a major theme, but as a backdrop highlighting those vexations that haunt the human consciousness. It employs what is known as a group of twenty septets with the rhyme scheme ababcc. read more

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A Westward Reaping Shall We Go

Posted on October 4, 2020 by Vajragoni

The idea of the west is fertile in the poetic imagination:

To the ancient Greeks, from, Odysseus onward, the West was the place of the Hesperides, those mystical islands located at the furthest western boundary of knowledge, where the golden apples of the Sun are found. For the English Romantic Poets, the idea of the West is truly an idea in the Coleridgean sense: it is utterly concrete, yet inscrutably complex, self-contradictory, and endlessly generative of new knowledge and activity. Wordsworth’s poem ponders the archetypal significance of traveling westward, “through the world that lay/ Before me in my endless way.” Such contemplative wandering into the boundless realm of the West comprises one of the most characteristic and distinctive themes of English Romantic Poetry…(James C. McKusick) read more

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Dark Workmanship

Posted on October 2, 2020 by Vajragoni

Wordsworth’s magnum opus, The Prelude, recounts the circumstances surrounding the growth of the poet’s mind involving elements of the natural world, the sense of how his own powers of imagination interacted with that realm, and the transcendent element that arises and unifies them both without abdicating the role that is the exclusive domain of the poet’s creative prowess. read more

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The Way of the Pure Mind

Posted on October 1, 2020 by Vajragoni

The poets of old oftentimes used to invoke their Sacred Muse to inspire them in their task. For this series we invoke William Wordsworth’s own Muse before we venture further. It evokes the ambiance of this present season in which we’re writing: read more

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Coming in October: Wordsworth and Zen

Posted on September 21, 2020 by Vajragoni

No other Romantic-Poet of the 19th century has touched and influenced my very beingness than the poetry of William Wordsworth (1770-1850). I distinctly remember with great-recall my first introduction to English Romanticism in 1978 during a college-class when the Professor, a distinguishably fashioned tall and elderly Indian (India) Oxford-taught gentleman (somewhat fragile in demeanor) with a full head of striking white hair, introduced us to Wordsworth and his works for the first time. The poem in question was Tintern Abbey (Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798). read more

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