William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth, English poet

William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. If Coleridge was the quintessential Romantic scientist, Wordsworth, most certainly, was the quintessential Romantic sentimentalist. Wordsworth, both in his poems and his prose, was expressly concerned with discovering a sort of spiritual ecstasy which, for him, could be found only in nature and the innocence of childhood. In this regard, Wordsworth is perhaps the most stereotypically romantic of the Romantics; he is a poet with a mind ever wandering after the wonders of nature and the emotions of the heart. Although sometimes criticized for his sentiment even by his contemporaries, (Keats famously detested him) Wordsworth's prominence in the Romantic movement is unmatched even by Coleridge, and it would be the poetry of Wordsworth, more than anyone else, that would influence the Victorian poets of the subsequent half of the 19th-century.

Life

Early Life and Education

The second of five children, Wordsworth was born in Cumberland—part of the scenic region in northwest England called the Lake District. With the death of his mother in 1778, his father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School. In 1783 his father, who was a lawyer and the solicitor for the Earl of Lonsdale (a man much despised in the area), died. The estate consisted of around £5000, most of it in claims upon the Earl, who thwarted these claims until his death in 1802. The Earl's successor, however, settled the claims with interest. After their father's death, the Wordsworth children were left under the guardianship of their uncles. Although many aspects of his boyhood were positive, he recalled bouts of loneliness and anxiety. It took him many years, and much writing, to recover from the death of his parents and his separation from his siblings.

Wordsworth began attending St John's College, Cambridge in 1787. In 1790, he visited Revolutionary France and supported the Republican movement. The following year, he graduated from Cambridge without distinction.

Travels to France

In November,1791, Wordsworth returned to France and took a walking tour of Europe that included the Alps and Italy. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave birth to their child, Caroline. Because of lack of money and Britain's tensions with France, he returned alone to England that year, but he supported Vallon and his daughter as best he could in later life. The Reign of Terror estranged him from the Republican movement, and war between France and Britain prevented him from seeing Annette and Caroline again for several years. There are also strong suggestions that Wordsworth may have been depressed and emotionally unsettled in the mid 1790s.

First Publication and Lyrical Ballads

1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He received a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing poetry. That year, he also met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, moved to Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement. The volume had neither the name of Wordsworth or Coleridge as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as author. A third edition of "Lyrical Ballads," published in 1802, contained more poems by Wordsworth, including a preface to the poems. This Preface to "Lyrical Ballads" is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry.

Travels to Germany

Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge then travelled to Germany. During the harsh winter of 1798-1799, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in Goslar, and despite extreme stress and loneliness, he began work on an autobiographical piece later titled The Prelude. He also wrote a number of famous poems, including "the Lucy poems." He and his sister moved back to England, now to Grasmere in the Lake District, and this time with fellow poet Robert Southey nearby. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey came to be known as the "Lake Poets". Through this period, many of his poems revolve around themes of death, endurance, separation, and grief.

Marriage

In 1802, he and Dorothy travelled to France to visit Annette and Caroline. Later that year, he married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy did not appreciate the marriage at first, but lived with the couple and later grew close to Mary. The following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, John.

Portrait, 1842, by Benjamin Haydon.

Both Coleridge's health and his relationship to Wordsworth began showing signs of decay in 1804. That year Wordsworth befriended Robert Southey. With Napoleon's rise as emperor of France, Wordsworth's last wisp of liberalism fell, and from then on he identified himself as a conservative.

Autobiographical Work and Poems in Two Volumes

Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call The Recluse. He had in 1798-99 started an autobiographical poem, which he never named but called the "poem to Coleridge", which would serve as an appendix to The Recluse. In 1804 he began expanding this autobiographical work, having decided to make it a prologue rather than an appendix to the larger work he planned. By 1805, he had completed it, but refused to publish so personal a work until he should have completed the whole of The Recluse. The death of his brother, John, in 1805 affected him strongly.

In 1807, his Poems in Two Volumes were published, including "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Up to this point Wordsworth was known publicly only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this collection would cement his reputation. Its reception was only lukewarm, however. For a time, Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction.

Two of his children, Thomas and Catherine, died in 1812. The following year, he moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside where he spent the rest of his life.

The Prospectus

In 1814 he published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part The Recluse. He had not completed the first and third parts, and never would complete them. However, he did write a poetic Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he lays out the structure and intent of the poem. The Prospectus contains some of Wordworth's most famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature:

My voice proclaims

How exquisitely the individual Mind

(And the progressive powers perhaps no less

Of the whole species) to the external World

Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too,

Theme this but little heard of among Men,

The external World is fitted to the Mind . . .

Some modern critics recognise a decline in his works beginning around the mid-1810s. But this decline was perhaps more a change in his lifestyle and beliefs, since most of the issues that characterise his early poetry (loss, death, endurance, separation, abandonment) were resolved in his writings. But, by 1820 he enjoyed the success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works.

Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 that rendered her an invalid for the remainder of her life. In 1835, Wordsworth gave Annette and Caroline the money they needed for support. The government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300 a year in 1842.

Death

William Wordsworth died in Rydal Mount in 1850 and was buried at St Oswald's Church in Grasmere.

His widow Mary published his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death. Though this failed to arouse great interest in 1850; it has since come to be recognised as his masterpiece.

Poetry

Wordsworth's poetry is characterized by two cardinal features which he lays explicitly in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads. There is, first and foremost, the use of what Wordsworth calls "the language really used by men". Any modern reader perusing Wordsworth's poetry might beg to differ, as Wordsworth's diction does most certainly not in any way resemble the guttural, uneducated jargon of farmers and country folk whom Wordsworth praises so highly. To properly understand what Wordsworth means by this—and the revolutionary nature of his work in comparison to the poetry of his time—one must take into consideration the currents of poetic fashion that had been dominant immediately prior to Romanticism; namely, the classical and highly ornate poetry of 18th-century poets such as Alexander Pope. Viewed in this light, Wordsworth's verse, in its use of relatively direct phrasings (Wordsworth almost always means what he seems), uncomplicated syntax (Wordsworth almost never butchers the language for the quaint sake of rhyme), and few allusions can be seen for what it was in its time: a refreshingly straight-forward style of poetry that harks back to much earlier English poetry but that unlike, for instance, the poetry of Milton, manages to remain musically pleasant and prosaically clear.

The second prominent feature of Wordsworth's poetry is its occupation with emotion, and in particular what Wordsworth called "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility". This sort of recollection of emotions in a state of tranquility was for Wordsworth the definition of poetry, and for him the job of the poet was, in some way, to delve into the self in order to recall the powerful emotions of ones life, and then to recast those emotions (or the events that inspired them or the thoughts they engendered) in the language of poetry. This is the most noticeable aspect of Wordsworth's poetry, and it results, at times, in some of maddeningly trite and sentimental poems ever written and, at other times, some of the most stunningly moving. A fine example of the latter case is Wordsworth's fantastic early sonnet, Composed Upon Westminster Bridge in which the narrator of the poem, a sentimental enthusiast of nature like Wordsworth, gazes out over the massive, industrial city of London and sees, of all things, arresting beauty there:

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Of Wordsworth's poetic output, the two most important works are without a doubt his early volume written with Coleridge, the Lyrical Ballads, and his posthumous long poem The Prelude. Both are indicative of the two very distinct styles that characterize the young Wordsworth and the old Wordsworth. In the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth writes verses flush with emotional vibrancy and natural scenes; in The Prelude, a much older and disillusioned poet writes a lengthy, exhaustive and, at times, exhausting meditation on the nature of life and the poet's connection to it, all of which is characterized by the late Wordsworth's style of writing didactic, almost instructional verses which, though difficult, became some of the most influential writings in the English-speaking world in the immediate aftermath of Wordsworth's death. Tennyson, among other major Victorian poets, would cite Wordsworth and The Prelude in particular as a tremendous influence, and it would be unjust not to quote the epic poem's famous opening lines as an example of the late, stern style of Wordsworth's masterpiece:

OH there is blessing in this gentle breeze,

A visitant that while it fans my cheek

Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings

From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.

Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come

To none more grateful than to me; escaped

From the vast city, where I long had pined

A discontented sojourner: now free,

Free as a bird to settle where I will.

What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale

Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove

Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream

Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?

The earth is all before me. With a heart

Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,

I look about; and should the chosen guide

Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,

I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!

Trances of thought and mountings of the mind

Come fast upon me: it is shaken off,

That burthen of my own unnatural self,

The heavy weight of many a weary day

Not mine, and such as were not made for me.

Long months of peace (if such bold word accord

With any promises of human life),

Long months of ease and undisturbed delight

Are mine in prospect; whither shall I turn,

By road or pathway, or through trackless field,

Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing

Upon the river point me out my course?

External links

• Bartleby.com's complete poetical works by Wordsworth
• Selected Poems by W.Wordsworth
• Collection of Poems and Quotes by William Wordsworth
• A Wordsworth FAQ by Thomas C. Gannon
• Biography and Works
• Works by William Wordsworth. Project Gutenberg
• Poetry Archive: 166 poems of William Wordsworth
• To Toussaint Louverture - poem by William Wordsworth
• The Wordsworth Trust
• Extensive Information on Wordsworth's Poem, Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

www.wordsworth.com

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• William Wordsworth  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "William Wordsworth"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.