William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth, English poet

William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850) was a major English poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic movement in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. Romanticism emerged in reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the Wordsworth and other Romantics sought to emphasize the vitality of everyday life, the validity and importance of human emotions, and the illuminating power of nature.

Romanticism also stressed the imagination as a critical authority, which encouraged freedom from classical conventions in art and, particularly in the lives of Lord Byron and Percy Shelly, overturned social conventions. Originally inspired by the French Revolution and the social changes it brought, Wordsworth tried to create a poetry of the people, in the language of the common man. Wordsworth, both in his poems and his prose, was expressly concerned with discovering a sort of spiritual ecstasy that, for him, could be found only in nature and the innocence of childhood. With a mind ever wandering after the wonders of nature and the emotions of the heart, Wordsworth was criticized for his sentiment and informality by his contemporaries (John Keats famously detested him). In later years,though, he attained preeminence among poets of the Romantic movement and was poet laureate of England from 1843 until his death in 1850. Wordsworth, more than any English writer, influenced the Victorian poets of the subsequent half of the nineteenth-century.

Life

Early years and education

The second of five children, William Wordsworth was born in Cumberland—part of the scenic region in northwest England called the Lake District. His father was a lawyer and the solicitor for the Earl of Lonsdale (a man much despised in the area). With the death of his mother in 1778, his father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School, and in 1783 his father also died, leaving the orphaned children under the guardianship of their uncles. Although many aspects of his boyhood were positive, he recalled bouts of loneliness and anxiety. It took Wordsworth many years, and much writing, to recover from the death of his parents and his separation from his siblings. The estate consisted of around £5,000, most of it in claims upon the Earl, who thwarted the claims until his death in 1802. The Earl's successor, however, settled the claims with interest.

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

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 French 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

Wordsworth's poetry was first published in 1793 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 and 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), a landmark work in emergence of the English Romantic movement. The volume had the name of neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge as author, and it included one of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey,” a meditation inspired by the "steep and lofty cliffs" and "pastoral farms" around the stone ruins of the ancient abbey, 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 is considered a central statement of Romantic literary theory, in which Wordsworth discusses the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the formalized poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry.

Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge then traveled to Germany. During the harsh winter of 1798-1799, Wordsworth lived with his sister in Goslar, and despite extreme stress and loneliness, he began work on an autobiographical piece later titled The Prelude, and completed a number of famous poems, including "the Lucy poems." Wordsworth and his sister then moved back to England, now to Grasmere in the Lake District, near fellow poet Robert Southey, who, with Wordsworth and Coleridge, 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 traveled to France to visit Annette and Caroline. Later that year, Wordsworth 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. 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. In 1798-99 he started an autobiographical poem, which he never named but called the "Poem to Coleridge," to serve as an appendix to The Recluse. In 1804 he began expanding this autobiographical work, deciding to make it a prologue rather than an appendix to the larger planned work. By 1805, he had completed it, but death of his brother John that same year affected him strongly and Wordsworth refused to publish so personal a work until completing the whole of The Recluse.

In 1807, his Poems in Two Volumes was 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. It received only lukewarm attention however.

Two of Wordsworth's children, Thomas and Catherine, died in 1812. Further disturbing his personal life, Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged for a time over the latter's opium addiction. The following year, he moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside, where he spent the rest of his life.

The Prospectus

In 1814 Wordsworth published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part work, 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 recognize 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 characterize 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 recognized as his masterpiece.

Poetry

Wordsworth's poetry is characterized by two cardinal features that he lays explicitly bare in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads. There is, first and foremost, the use of what Wordsworth calls "the language really used by men." Contemporary readers Wordsworth's poetry might beg to differ, as Wordsworth's diction little resembles the guttural, uneducated jargon of farmers and country folk whom Wordsworth praises so highly. To properly understand what Wordsworth means—and the revolutionary nature of his work in comparison to the poetry of his time—one must consider the poetic conventions immediately prior to Romanticism; specifically , the classical and highly ornate poetry of eighteenth-century poets such as Alexander Pope. Viewed in this light, Wordsworth's verse uses 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. From this perspective his work can be seen for what it was in its time: a refreshingly straight-forward style of poetry that harks back to much earlier English poetic style, but unlike, for instance, the poetry of Milton, still manages to remain musically pleasant and prosaically clear.

The second prominent feature of Wordsworth's poetry is its preoccupation 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 very definition of poetry. For him the job of the poet was, in some way, to delve into the self in order to recall the powerful emotions of one's life, and then to recast those emotions (including the events that inspired them, or the thoughts they engendered) into the language of poetry. This is the most noticeable aspect of Wordsworth's poetry, resulting in both trite and sentimental verse and stunningly moving poetic meditations. A fine example of the latter case is Wordsworth's 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!

Wordsworth's two most important works are his early volume written with Coleridge, the Lyrical Ballads, and his posthumous long poem The Prelude. They 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 exhaustive and, at times, exhausting meditations on the nature of life and the poet's connection to it, characterized by the late Wordsworth's didactic, almost instructional style of writing. Though frequently difficult, this later verse 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 singular influence. The epic poem's famous opening lines exemplify the late, stern style of Wordsworth:

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!

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

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