• The Poem
• Notes on Context
• Notes on Form
• Notes on Content
• Commentary and Quotations

 
First published in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s groundbreaking joint collection, Lyrical Ballads (1798), “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” is among the most famous and influential of Wordsworth’s odes. It embodies the crucial concepts Wordsworth set out in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, which served as a manifesto for Romantic poetry:

• Poems made “by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation,” choosing “incidents and situations from common life... in a selection of language really used by men.”
   
• The language of poetry used to delineate “the primary laws of our nature... the essential passions of the heart... our elementary feelings... in a state of simplicity.”
   
• Poems designed solely to give “immediate pleasure to a human Being possessed of that information which may be expected from him, not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man.”
   
• Poems illustrating the truth of “man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature.”
   
• Good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.”