‘Uncertain notice’: Unearthing Wales in William Wordsworth’s ‘Simon Lee’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’

One of the defining attributes Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads was poets’ focus on subjects ‘low rustic life’, especially potentials for enhanced human understanding accessed through language people such social stations. This essay examines Wordsworth’s ‘Simon Lee’ ‘Tintern Abbey’, two entries set in Wales that contrast to collection’s manifesto do not feature voices local inhabitants. Recent scholarship has effectively compounded Welsh locals’ status: addition comparatively little consideration given history would cover these topics, scholars have also at times re-set poems England, even suggested inhabitants actually symbolise or otherwise represent English people. Minimising, disregarding, altering poems’ settings limits, misshapes, any meaningful poetic analysis. I argue each poem a deep cultural histories respective setting – Cardiganshire Monmouthshire Abbey’ produces more comprehensive appreciation themselves. Furthermore, rather than acting as signs unchanged since antiquity (another consensus among many literary scholars), muted residents record results far-reaching change, specifically loss traditions, community life, economic stability. Such an approach enhances our wider contexts, including: authorship; Romantic Wales; imagination; eighteenth-century Wales. demonstrate points by incorporating primary materials complement my accounts poem, including contemporary examination Lee’, period Tintern Abbey Abbey’.