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Wordsworth’s Poetry

To understand where “Intimations of Immortality” sits in relation to Wordsworth’s other major poems, please consult this guide, which provides an analytical overview.

John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

John Keats arguably stands as one of the masters of the ode form, regardless of time period or language of composition. To see how the two poets’ approaches to this ancient tradition differ and converge, it’s worth comparing Wordsworth’s ode to one of Keats’s greatest: “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” In particular, consider how different the poems are in terms of the speaker’s object of address. Whereas in Keats’s poem the speaker directly addresses a very concrete object (i.e., an urn), in Wordsworth’s poem the speaker can only glimpse obscure “intimations” of a rather abstract object (i.e., immortality).

Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

Though Matthew Arnold lived during the Victorian period, he wrote in a lyric tradition that had been renewed by the British Romantics, and especially by William Wordsworth. “Dover Beach” bears the indisputable imprint of the Romantics, and a comparison with “Intimations of Immortality” helps show why. Both poems feature a first-person speaker who, in a melancholy mood, reflects on the irreversible passage of time and, albeit in different ways, on the degrading effects of life experience.

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