William Wordsworth Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ross Woodman

Critical Essay by Ross Woodman

SOURCE: “Milton's Satan in Wordsworth's ‘Vale of Soul-making,’” in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring, 1984, pp. 3-30.

In the following essay, Woodman discusses subtle echoes of the Miltonic Satan in William Wordsworth's poetry.

By our own spirits are we deified: We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

(“Resolution and Independence.” ll. 47-49)

I

In several of Wordsworth's lyrics, “We Are Seven” and “Anecdote For Fathers” among them, an adult narrator confronts a small child and, like the “homely Nurse”¹ of the “Immortality” ode, “even with something of a Mother's mind, / And no unworthy aim” does all he can to make the child “forget the glories he hath known, / And that imperial palace whence he came” (ll. 79-84). Because the narrator presumably has “yearnings … in [his] own natural kind,” the encounter is an attempted seduction...
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