Escapism and Nostalgia in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" And Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree": Recollections on Longing and Memory

The comparative study between William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and William Butler Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” has been made in the paper based on the theoretical points of view of psychoanalysis and ecocriticism. The poets were born and brought up in two different periods. Wordsworth (1770-1850) belongs to the Romantic Age and Yeats (1865-1939) to the Modern Age—the first one wants to live on his past memories while the second one longs for his roots of Irish indigene. Every memory, either sad or happy, grows on an event of life that feeds the troubled mind later years with some retrospective feelings and emotions. Both of the poets have chosen two ingredient elements of romanticism—escapism and nostalgia—to make a sojourn of utopia through romantic recollections staying into two different worlds of romance and reality. Writers of the Romanticist or of the Modernist ideologies, like Wordsworth and Yeats, try to escape to an ideal world either in childhood and adolescent past or in the landscape of serene beauty. The poems we have chosen deal with the romantic worlds of recollections where the writers wish to escape from the troubled materialistic worlds of din and bustle. Being repeatedly disappointed with the mundane life of change and progress, cruelty and corruption, love, distrust and hatred, and above all, continuous fight for livelihood both Yeats and Wordsworth want to flee to their bygone days of sweet memories; Yeats longs for fleeing to the countryside of Ireland, his place of birth, and Wordsworth to his child memories. We have tried a little bit to analyze their nostalgic feelings and emotions through the thematic discussions of the selected poems from psychoanalytical and ecocritical points of view.