Style and Structure
The poem is written in tightly-structured blank verse and comprises verse-paragraphs rather than stanzas. It is unrhymed and mostly in iambic pentameter. Categorising the poem is difficult, as it contains elements of all of the ode, the dramatic monologue and the conversation poem. In the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth noted:
I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification would be found the principle requisites of that species of composition.
At its beginning, it may well be dubbed an Eighteenth-Century "landscape-poem", but it is commonly agreed that the best designation would be the conversation poem.
Read more about this topic: Tintern Abbey (poem)
Famous quotes containing the words style and, style and/or structure:
“I am so tired of taking to others
translating my life for the deaf, the blind,
the “I really want to know what your life is like without giving up any of my privileges
to live it” white women
the “I want to live my white life with Third World women’s style and keep my skin
class privileges” dykes”
—Lorraine Bethel, African American lesbian feminist poet. “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?” Lines 49-54 (1979)
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“A special feature of the structure of our book is the monstrous but perfectly organic part that eavesdropping plays in it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)