PEL Presents SUBTEXT: Mother Nature's Nurture in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (Part 1)

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

• Episode: PEL Presents SUBTEXT: Mother Nature's Nurture in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" (Part 1)
• Website: The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
• Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThePartiallyExaminedLife
• Duration: 00:51:13
• Published: 2022-01-28 19:00

After an absence of five years, the poet William Wordsworth returned to the idyllic ruins of a medieval monastery along the River Wye. The spot was perhaps not so very different from his last visit, but Wordsworth found that he had undergone a significant transformation in the intervening years. In a long blank-verse meditation, he explores the changes that the memory of this landscape has affected on his psyche and the role it played in his now-mature comportment towards nature, impulse, and desire. What can Wordsworth’s poem teach us about our own relationships to the natural world? Can Mother Nature truly exert a parental influence? Can nature even make us better people? In this Part One of a two-part episode, Wes & Erin discuss the first three stanzas of Wordsworth’s 1798 poem, “Tintern Abbey.” 

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