• What might be revealed in this poem is a song of defeated people, or interference of some kind with her culture from the outside. The general atmosphere of such things is just in the air and perhaps is enjoyed, but not actually analyzed by the narrator. Instead, the girl is detached from the contexts, “behold her, single in the field.”
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The Solitary Reaper:
a postcolonial interpretation
• The postcolonial critic Edward Said pointed out in his “Orientalism”(1978) that non-western otherness was created and consumed by western commentators. They sought not so much to understand other cultures but to revel in the spectacle and sensation of their difference.
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What is good poetry?
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility 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.
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Who can be a poet?
• A poet is a man speaking to men,: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the going-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.
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• He claimed that the great subjects of poetry were “the essential passions of the heart” and “the great and simple affections” as these qualities interact with "the beautiful and permanent forms of nature” and are expressed in a “naked and simple” language that is “adapted to interest mankind permanently”.
• Brought about a revolution in poetry by taking common themes and events and writing in the language of ordinary men.
• He was strongly against the neo-classical poetry. He changed the course of English poetry by using ordinary speech of thlitary Reaper: a postcolonial interpretation • Rather than assuming a single nationalist viewpoint, it might be suggested to see the different layers of cultural identity. • Out of treacherous circumstances, as much as any more positive ones, emerges literary expression.
William Wordsworth
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William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
• One of the most accomplished and influential of England’s romantic poets
• One of the Lake Poets: William Wordsworth; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Robert Southey