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: To that dream-like vividness and splendor which invest objects of sight in childhood, every one, I believe, if he … Continue reading →

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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 … Continue reading →

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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 … Continue reading →

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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 … Continue reading →

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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 … Continue reading →

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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, … Continue reading →

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