beauty and dignity

How does Wordsworth see beauty? Here for the first time Wordsworth explicitly explores his notion of an aesthetic in an appeal to reinvent a new notion through his poetry. In this paragraph especially he speaks of the human mind’s “capability” to possess a notion of “beauty and dignity” suddenly diminished in light of societal advancements. He speaks of the speediness of city life and a need for a more “rapid communication of intelligence”. He calls these and other states the “gross and violent stimulants” that seem to originate more out of the mind’s thirst for sensationalism, than an appeal to the natural world and its subtle phenomena. In contrasting the “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” that most men of his time seem to be experiencing with his own hypersensitivity to the faint subtleties of life, William Wordsworth alludes again to his relation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

If we were to compare Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, two different notions of an aesthetic would be self-evident. But beyond their differences, (the latter being more invested in creativity and the mind’s inspiration, the other looking to nature) it seems to me Wordsworth and Coleridge fall into agreement in their tasks as poets. Both, through different means, seem to counteract the growing need for an “extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies”. I would argue too that although at first Coleridge somehow seems invested in the sensational and “super-natural”, it seems to me that the poet grows into such an extremity out of a need to over-glorify and return our attention to the ordinary with such excesses in mind. In both their own ways Wordsworth and Coleridge are saviors of literature, prophets of a reinvention of aesthetic values, and intend to sharpen a blunt society’s aesthetic for beauty.