THE DUALITY OF THE POETIC MIND The Conscious and Personal Identity in the Universal World of ‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘The Nightingale’

Abstract

This thesis discusses how William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge use their own personal identity while writing poetry that deal with universal matter of nature. Poetry is a mental form of art, and does not exist without this deeper personal understanding. By analysing how these universal and unconscious matters are described through two poems from Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a few miles above TINTERN ABBEY, on revisiting the banks of the WYE during a tour’, and Coleridge’s ‘The Nightingale’, this thesis is applying elements from a theory cognitive poetics and a theory of the archetypes and our collective unconscious, as well as the literary criticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, to discuss how the two poets’ urge us to use our own personal and subjective identity in a conscious manner when writing, reading, and analysing poetry that deal with the universal and objective aspects of the world.