Similar Attitudes Toward Machinery, Language, and Substance in Wordswor

Similar Attitudes Toward Machinery, Language, and Substance in Wordsworth, pontiff and DrydenWilliam Wordsworths antedate to Lyrical Ballads is from the Romantic Period of British literary works, eyepatch Alexander Popes The Rape of the Lock and John Drydens Mac Flecknoe atomic number 18 both from the Neoclassical Period The Rape of the Lock is from the Augustan Age, while Mac Flecknoe is from the Restoration (Literary). Despite these discrepancies in the time periods that their single works were produced, however, Wordsworth, Pope, and Dryden express similar attitudes toward machinery, language, and substance. Their works evidence their agreement that machinery is a destructive force of concomitant production and repetition good poetical language should exclude such repetition and be original and developed, and poetic images can be used to create substance out of a lack of substance. First, the texts of Wordsworth, Pope, and Dryden evidence their agreement that mach inery is a destructive force of serial production and repetition. In Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes, However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of a Poet, it is obvious, that, while he describes and imitates passions, his situation is altogether slavish and mechanical, compared with the immunity and power of real and substantial action and suffering (361). In this statement, Wordsworth expresses his view that an association with anything mechanical, or operated or produced by a mechanism or machine, is not exalted and is indecent to a poet machinery does not help produce freedom and substance ( mechanised). In The Rape of the Lock, Pope similarly demonstrates that machinery causes a lack of freedom and ... ...ntic Period, the three works agree on three ideas. They agree that machinery is a destructive force of serial production and repetition good poetic language should exclude such repetition and be original and substantial, and poetic images can be used to create substance out of a lack of substance. Interestingly, their views are quite relevant to a British literature student who has to use her laptop computer to produce an original, substantial speckle of writing from four blank sheets of paper. Works CitedLiterary Periods of British and American Literature. The Literary Explorer. Rene Goodvin. 15 Nov. 2004.Mechanical. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language 2000 Fourth ed. Bartleby.com. 15 Nov. 2004 .(The Longman Anthology of British Literature 2nd Edition, Volumes 1c and 2a).