There can be no doubt about the setting or occasion of William Wordsworth’s great lyric poem, “Tintern Abbey,” the full title of which is, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.” Wordsworth wrote the poem when Lyrical Ballads, his collaborative volume with friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was already going to press. Yet he managed to sneak the poem in at the last minute, putting it at the very end of the volume. This placement nicely reflects its status as the culmination of the project set forth in Lyrical Ballads, which was no less than to reimagine poetry for the new century. In his preface to the second edition (1800), Wordsworth explicitly rejected the rigid formalism of eighteenth-century poetry and wanted to infuse his own verse with emotion. As he famously put the matter in the preface:

[P]oetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

None of Wordsworth’s poems better reflects this characterization of poetry than “Tintern Abbey,” the central preoccupation of which is the restorative power of recollection. The poem’s speaker explores this theme through a meditative and intricately structured reflection on memory and the enduring consolation of nature.

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