Jane: Awe in the Mundane

In Jane's pecha kucha presentation, she uses Wordsworth as an example of the contrast between awe and pragmatics. I thought this was really interesting, especially since I had just read these lines from Wordsworth's "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads":

"The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way . . . "

To me, this is Wordsworth's attempt at combining the pragmatics of the day-to-day and the unordinary awe-experiences of life in general. It's so easy to think the two are impossibly contradictory, but I think Wordsworth proves that one can really equal the other when the right perspective is taken.

He gives examples of specific poems and their purpose. Maybe these lists will give you ideas of text to read and draw from!

"This object I have endeavored in these short essays to attain by various means: by tracing the maternal passion through many of its more subtle windings, as in the poem of the Idiot Boy and the Mad Mother; by accompanying the last struggles of a human being, at the approach of death, cleaving in solitude to life and society, as in the poem of the Forsaken Indian; by shewing, as in the stanzas entitles We Are Seven, the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion . . . "

(This next list offers poems with a different perspective)

"It has also been part of my general purpose to attempt to sketch characters under the influence of less impassioned feelings,"--he gives these examples: Two April Mornings, The Fountain, The Old Man Travelling, The Two Thieves

Last, one of Wordsworth's final poems, Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg, is said to mirror his style in the Lyrical Ballads. This could be a really interesting poem to look at with your perspective! Did pragmatics or awe win out for Wordsworth in the end?