WORDSWORTH’ÜN ROMANTİK ŞAİRİ VE BAUDELAIRE’IN MODERN SANATÇISI ARASINDAKİ BENZERLİKLER

Abstract

Modern art has been regarded as a reaction to what is called the expressive mode of Romanticism. This tendency may stem from the fact that many modernists describe their art in opposition to Romantic poetry and especially to Wordsworth’s concepts of poetry and the poet as theorized in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads. However, it is still possible to see some parallelisms between these two movements, Romanticism and Modernism, in terms of the concept of the artist, his new and revolutionary style, and his choice of subject matter. Although modern art has been opposed to previous artistic movements strictly, it is highly necessary to pin down the influences of the antecedents on modernists to understand modern works more comprehensively. For this reason, the first part of this study will introduce how Wordsworth defines the Romantic Poet in his “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads, regarded as the manifesto of British Romantic poetry. In the second part, the paper will explore how Baudelaire constructs the figure of the modern artist in his work, namely The Painter of Modern Life and in what ways the ideas of these two poets are connected. There will be a constant focus on the link between perceiving and expressing since these are the main traits that characterize the artist in both literary movements, namely Romanticism and Modernism. Through an unusual reading of Wordsworth’s “Preface”, this paper will examine in what ways the figure of the modern artist is already existent in Wordsworth’s theory of poetry.