Abstract:

In the Bildungsroman development history, Goethe is generally accredited for having introduced Bildung, making formation or becoming a fictional reality with regard to character representation strategies, in his Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, but the importance of romanticism is no less significant. Romantics in their literary concern with the development of an individual subject already had thematically treated the formative principle and used it in a very similar to the Bildungsroman way of thematic representation. Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth shows an individual in his early adulthood corresponding to the moment in the Bildungsroman of the character entering upon maturity. The principle of formation here is conceived as interrelated with nature and rural setting, and nature, in particular, is the source of formation and of becoming not simply of a mature personality but of a poet. In the process of development of a poetic mind from youth to maturity, concerning the formation as a poet, nature co-participates – in matters of “emotion recollected in tranquillity” – in the process of literary composition. As a result, in a kind of co-authorship, the poem is being written by the assistance of nature which means that the poet achieves formation. To disclose this interpretative aspect is the aim of our study as it is out attempt to show how the poem deconstructs its own process of composition, the way in which it is actually being written, and hence the Tintern Abbey, besides being a Bildungsgedicht or Lehrgedicht, is also a self-reflexive poem, a metapoem.

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