(sub)Text: Mother Nature’s Nurture in Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (Part 1) | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog (opens in new tab)

After an absence of five years, the poet William Wordsworth returned to the idyllic ruins of a medieval monastery along the River Wye. The spot was perhaps not so very different from his last visit, but Wordsworth found that he had undergone a significant transformation in the intervening years. In a long blank-verse meditation, he explores the changes that the memory of this landscape has affected on his psyche and the role it played in his now-mature comportment towards nature, impulse, and...