William Wordsworth
Life and works of William Wordsworth
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4.21 Description of the
scenary of the Lake
View of the Country
as Formed by Nature
Aspect of the
Country, as Affected
by Its Inhabitants
Changes, and Rules
of Taste for
Preventing Their Bad
Effects
Profile of the poet
Love and Revolution
in France
5. Romanticon:
Wordsworth's Corpus
Reflects the Growth of a
Conservative's Mind
1. Life
1.1 Sojourn in France
1.2 Publication of First Poem
1.3 Poems of the Middle Period
1.4 Changes in Philosophy
1.5 Poems of 1802
1.6 Later years
1.7 Further Reading
1.8 Early life and education
1.9 Relationship with Annette
Vallar
1.10 First publication and
Lyrical Ballads
1.11 Germany and move to the
Lake District
1.12 Marriage and Children
1.13 Autobiographical work and
Poems in two Volumes
1.14 The Prospectus
1.15 The Poet Laureate and
other honors
2. Context
2.1 French Revolution
3. Analysis
3.1 Revolution and
Romanticism
3.2 Dorothy and Coleridge
3.3 Marriage
3.4 Wordsworth’s true love
3.5 Trivia
4. Biography
4.1 Lyrical Ballads
4.1.1 Content
4.1.2 Prefece to the Lyrical
Ballads
4.2 We are Seven
Wordsworth had
become a neocon
How the poet's
inspired 'breathings'
contain the world that
surrounds him
6. Wordsworth, Joseph
Johnson, and the
Salisbury Plain poems
Salisbury Plain
7. Narrative means to
lyric ends in
Wordsworth's Prelude
Narrative, Lyric, and
their possible
relations
Prospective reading
A model of
prospective reading:
the river
Temporal blurring
and lyrical effects
The narrator’s
temporal relationship
to events
Gerard Genette's
expressions
The prelude’s
structural similarities
to other texts
8. The question of love's
possibility explored
through the poetry of
William Wordsworth
8.1 Neglect of the heart
8.2 Loss
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4.2.1 Wordsworth’s “We are
Seven” and Crabbe’s The
Parish and anti-census
·
The way of we are Seven
·
Democraphic history
·
Wordsworth’s early poems
·
First stanza
·
What else do we find the
scene of Counting?
·
First question of the poem
·
Malthus’ idea
·
Romantic Poets
4.3 Anecdote for Fathers
4.4 Lucy gray
4.5 The Lucy poems
·
Separation from Coleridge
·
Identuty of Lucy
·
The poems
·
Grouping as a series
·
Interpretation
·
Critical assessment
·
Later parodies and
allusion
4.6 The Matthew poems
4.7 Michael
·
Structure and Style
·
Lucy
·
Parodies
4.8 Tintern Abbey
·
Summary
·
Form
·
Commentary
·
Notes
4.9 Composed upon Westmister
Bridge, September 3, 1802
4.10 I wandered Lonely as a
Cloud
4.11 London, 1802
4.12 Ode: Intimations of
Immortality From Recollection
4.13 Resolution and
Indipendence
4.14 The solitary Reaper
4.15 The world is too much with
us
4.16 The Excursion
4.17 Strange fits of passion
have I know
4.18 It is a beauteous evening,
calm and free
4.19 The Mad Mother
·
Regular stanza
·
Song’s end
4.20 I wondered lonely as a
cloud
8.3 Nature of Wordsworth
8.4 Solitude and
Attachment
9. Wordsworth's
anatomies of surprise
9.1The account of
pleasure and the dangers
9.2 Occurrence as an
autobiographical vignette
9.3 Wordsworth's final
stanza
9.4 Joy in Wordsworth
10. Wordsworth and
Joseph Johnson: the
Salisbury Plain poems
10.1 Adventures on
Salisbury Plain
11. The deep characters of
knowledge in
Wordsworth's The
Excursion
11.1 Romantic studies
of animal and plant
12. Wordsworth and
Shakespeare
12.1 Spirit of
Shakespeare
12.2 Tragedy of
Margaret
12.3 Hart-Leap Well,
Othello and Hamlet
13.Wordsworth and
Austen
13.1 His near
contemporary and a
similar project
14. Wordsworth and
Charlotte Smith
14.1 Charlotte Smith's
"viewless wind"
14.2 Apt illustrations of
the moral world
14.3 On Leaving a Part
of Sussex
14.4 The Emigrants
14.5 Final comparison
1. Life
William Wordsworth was born in Cookermouth, Cumberland, on April 7, 1770, the second infant of an advocate.
Differently the other most important English romantic poets, he enjoyed a happy childhood under the loving care of his mother and in close intimacy with his younger sister
Dorothy (1771-1855).
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As an adolescent, he wandered exuberantly
through the lovely natural scenery of
Cumberland.
At Hawkshead Grammar School, Wordsworth
showed keen and precociously discriminating
interest in poetry.
He was fascinated by "the divine John Milton," impressed by George Crabbe's descriptions of poverty, and repelled by the "falsehood" and "spurious imagery" in Ossian's nature
poetry.
From 1787 to 1790 Wordsworth attended St. John's College, Cambridge, for all time returning with breathless delight to the north and to nature during his summer vacations.
Previous to graduating from Cambridge, he took a walking tour through France, Switzerland, and Italy in 1790.
The Alps gave him an ecstatic notion that he was not to recognize until 14 years later as a mystical:
"sense of usurpation, when the light of sense/ Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed/ The invisible world" - the world of "infinitude" that is "our beings's heart and home."
1.1 Sojourn in France
Revolutionary fervor in France made a influential impact on the young idealist, who returned there in November 1791 allegedly to improve his knowledge of the French
language.
Wordsworth's live in Paris, Orléans, and Blois proved decisive in three significant respects.
Primary, his understanding of politics at the time was slight, but his French experience was a powerful factor in turning his inbred sympathy for plain common
people, among whom he had spent the happiest years of his life, into articulate radicalism.
Subsequent, in 1792 Wordsworth composed his most
ambitious poem to date, the Descriptive Sketches.
An admittedly juvenile, derivative work, it was in fact
less descriptive of nature than the earlier An Evening
Walk, composed at Cambridge.
But it superior illustrated his vein of protest and his
belief in political freedom.
Finally, while Wordsworth's political ideas and poetic
talent were thus beginning to take shape, he fell
fervently in love with a French girl, Annette Vallon.
She gave birth to their daughter in December 1792.
Having exhausted his meager funds, he was obliged to go back home.
The division left him with a sense of guilt that deepened his poetic inspiration and that accounted for the prominence of the theme of derelict womanhood in much of his work.
1.2 Publication of First Poems
Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk were produced in 1793.
By then, Wordsworth's wretchedness over Annette and their child had been aggravated by a tragic sense of torn loyalties as war broke out between England and the French
Republic.
This disagreement precipitated his republicanism, which he expounded with almost religious zeal and eloquence in A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, while his new inventive
insight into human sorrow and fortitude found poetic expression in "Salisbury Plain."
The power of William Godwin's ideas in Political Justice prompted Wordsworth to write "Guilt and Sorrow," and this influence is also perceptible in his unactable drama, The
Borderers (1796).
This Sturm und Drang work, on the other hand, also testified to the poet's humanitarian disappointment with the French Revolution, which had lately engaged in the terrorist
regime of Maximilien de Robespierre.
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The year 1797 marked the beginning of Wordsworth's long and equally enriching friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the first fruit of which was their joint publication of
Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Wordsworth's main share in the volume was conceived as a daring experiment to challenge "the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers" in the name of
precision in psychology and realism in diction.
Most of his poems in this compilation centered on the simple yet deeply human feelings of ordinary people, phrased in their own language.
His views on this new kind of poetry were more fully described in the important "Preface" that he wrote for the second edition (1800).
Wordsworth's most remarkable contribution to
this volume was "Tintern Abbey," which he
wrote just in time for addition in it.
This sonnet is the first major piece to illustrate
his original talent at its best.
A lyrical summing up of the poet's experiences
and expectations, it skillfully combines matterof-factness in natural description with a
genuinely mystical sense of infinity, joining selfexploration to philosophical speculation.
At the same time as tracing the poet's ascent
from unthinking enjoyment of nature to the
most exalted perception of cosmic oneness, it
also voices his gnawing perplexity as the writer
- prophetically, as it turned out - wonders
whether his exhilarating vision of universal
harmony may not be a transient delusion.
The poem closes on a subdued but certain reassertion of nature's healing power, even though mystical insight may be withdrawn from the poet.
In its victorious blending of inner and outer familiarity, of sense perception, feeling, and thought, "Tintern Abbey" is a poem in which the writer's self becomes an adequate symbol
of mankind; undisguisedly subjective reminiscences lead to imaginative speculations about man and the universe.
This cosmic viewpoint rooted in self-interest is a central feature of romanticism, and Wordsworth's poetry is undoubtedly the most impressive exponent of this view in English
literature.
The writing of "Tintern Abbey" anticipated the later spiritual evolution of Wordsworth; it clarified the direction that his best work took in the next few years; and it heralded the
period in which he made his imperishable contribution to the development of English romanticism.
Considerably, this period was also the time of his closest intimacy with Dorothy - who kept the records of their experiences and thus supplied him with an unceasing flow of
motifs, characters, and incidents on which to base his poetry - and with Coleridge, whose constant encouragement and criticism provided the incentive to ever deeper searching
and to more articulate thinking.
The three lived at Nether Stowey, Somerset, in 1797-1798; took a trip to Germany in 1798-1799, which left little impression on Wordsworth's mind; and then settled in Grasmere
in the Lake District.
1.3 Poems of the Middle Period
Even at the same time as writing his contributions to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth had been feeling his way toward more ambitious schemes.
He had embarked on a long poem in blank verse, "The Ruined Cottage," later referred to as "The Peddlar"; it was intended to form part of a vast philosophical poem
that was to bear the painfully explicit title "The Recluse, or Views of Man, Nature and Society."
In it the poet hoped to "assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of
philosophy."
This impressive project, in which Coleridge had a
considerable share of responsibility, never
materialized as originally contemplated; its materials
were later incorporated into The Excursion (1815),
which centers on the poet's own problems and
conflicts under a thin disguise of objectivity.
This deformation is significant.
Nonfigurative impersonal speculation was not
congenial to Wordsworth; he could handle
experiences in the philosophical-lyrical manner that
was truly his own only insofar as they were closely
related to himself and therefore genuinely aroused
his creative feelings and imagination.
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For the duration of the winter months that he spent in Germany, he started work on his magnum opus, the "poem on his own mind," which was to be published posthumously as
The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind.
As yet, on the other hand, such an accomplishment was still beyond Wordsworth's capacity, and it was back to the shorter poetic forms that he turned during the most productive
season of his long literary life, the spring of 1802, when the great loss anticipated in "Tintern Abbey" came over him.
The production of these fertile months, on the other hand, mostly derived from his earlier, twofold inspiration: nature and the common people.
In "To a Butterfly," "I wandered lonely as a cloud," "To the Cuckoo," "The Rainbow," and other poems, Wordsworth went on to express his inexhaustible delight and participation
in nature's "beauteous forms."
As poems as "The Sailor's Mother" and "Alice Fell, or the Beggar-Woman" were in the Lyrical Ballads vein, voicing "the still, sad music of humanity" and exhibiting once more his
unfailing understanding of and compassion for the sufferings and moral resilience of the poor.
1.4 Changes in Philosophy
The essential event of this period was Wordsworth's loss of the sense of mystical oneness, which had sustained his highest imaginative flights.
Certainly, a mood of despondency as acute as Coleridge's in "Dejection" at times descended over Wordsworth, now 32 years old, as life compelled him to outgrow
the joyful, irresponsible gladness of youth. He became engaged to Mary Hutchinson, a girl he had known since childhood.
Marriage in 1802 entailed new cares and responsibilities.
One was to secure some sort of financial
stability, and another was somehow to wind up
the Annette Vallon episode.
In the summer of 1802 Wordsworth spent a few
weeks in Calais with Dorothy, where he arranged
a gracious separation with Annette and their
child.
Napoleon Bonaparte had just been elected first
consul for life, and Wordsworth's renewed
contact with France only confirmed his
disappointment with the French Revolution and
its aftermath.
For the duration of this period he had become
increasingly concerned with Coleridge, who by
now was almost totally dependent upon opium
for relief from his physical sufferings.
Together friends were thus brought face to face with the unpalatable fact that the realities of life were in stark contradiction to the visionary expectations of their youth.
But while Coleridge recognized this and gave up poetry for abstruse pursuits that were more congenial to him, Wordsworth typically sought to redefine his own identity in ways
that would allow him a measure of continuity in purposefulness.
The new turn that his life took in 1802 resulted in an inner change that set the new course that his poetry henceforth followed.
In earlier days, Wordsworth's attention in the common people, whom he knew and loved and admired, had prompted him to suppose a revolutionary stance.
He now relinquished this stance, his attachment to his "dear native regions" extending to his native country and its institutions, which he now envisioned as a more suitable
emblem of genuine freedom and harmony than France's revolutionary turmoils and republican imperialism.
Poetry about England and Scotland began pouring forth from his pen, while France and Napoleon soon became Wordsworth's favorite symbols of cruelty and oppression.
His patriotic inspiration led him to produce the two "Memorials of a Tour in Scotland" (1803, 1814) and the group entitled "Poems Dedicated to National Independence and
Liberty."
1.5 Poems of 1802
The most excellent poems of 1802, on the other hand, deal with a deeper level of inner change: with Wordsworth's awareness of his loss and with his manly
determination to find moral and poetic compensation for it.
In his verse "Intimations of Immortality" (March-April), he plainly recognized that "The things which I have seen I now can see no more"; yet he emphasized that
although the "visionary gleam" had fled, the memory remained, and although the "celestial light" had vanished, the "common sight" of "meadow, grove and stream"
was still a potent source of delight and solace.
And in "Resolution and Independence"
(May), he in fact reproved himself to
welcome his loss in a spirit of stoic
acceptance and of humble gratefulness to
God.
Consequently Wordsworth shed his
earlier tendency to a pantheistic
idealization of nature and turned to a
more sedate doctrine of orthodox
Christianity.
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Younger poets and opponents soon
blamed him for this "recantation," which
they equated with his change of mind
about the French Revolution.
At the same time as it is true that lyrical outbursts about duty and religion are apt to sound conventional and sanctimonious to modern ears, one cannot doubt the sincerity of
Wordsworth's belief, expressed in 1815, that "poetry is most just to its own divine origin when it administers the comforts and breathes the spirit of religion."
His Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822), which claim to explain "the introduction, progress, and operation of the Church of England, both previous and subsequent to the Reformation,"
are clear confirmation of the way in which love of freedom, of nature, and of the Church came to coincide in his mind.
On the other hand, it was the direction suggested in "Intimations of Immortality" that, in the view of later criticism, enabled Wordsworth to produce perhaps the most outstanding
achievement of English romanticism: The Prelude.
He worked on it, on and off, for several years and completed the first version in May 1805.
The Prelude can claim to be the only true romantic epic because it deals in narrative terms with the spiritual growth of the only true romantic hero, the poet.
Consequently Wordsworth evolved a new genre peculiarly suited to his temperament.
In this verse as in most of his best poetry - but here on a larger scale - the egocentricity for which he has often been rebuked was validated through symbolism.
The inward odyssey of the poet was not described
for its own sake but as a sample and as an
adequate image of man at his most sensitive.
Wordsworth divided the general romantic notion
that personal experience is the only way to gain
living knowledge.
The reason of The Prelude was to recapture and
interpret, with detailed thoroughness, the whole
range of experiences that had contributed to the
shaping of his own mind.
Such a process enabled him to rekindle the dying
embers of his earlier vision; it also enabled him to
reassess the transient truth and the lasting value of
his earlier glorious insights in the light of mature
wisdom.
It lies in the nature of such an extended process of reminiscence and revaluation that only death can end it, and Wordsworth wisely refrained from publishing the poem in his
lifetime, revising it continuously.
The posthumously printed description differs in some ways from the text he read to Coleridge in 1807.
It is shocking, on the other hand, that the changes from the early version should not be more radical than they are.
Most of them are developments in style and structure.
Wordsworth's youthful interest for the French Revolution has been slightly toned down.
Most significant and, perhaps, most to be regretted, the poet also tried to give a more orthodox tinge to his early mystical faith in nature.
1.6 Later Years
This kind of alteration toward orthodoxy had already been introduced in 1804, by which time the basic features of Wordsworth's mature personality had begun to
stabilize.
Of his later life, certainly, little needs to be said.
He was much affected by the death of his brother
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John in 1805, an event that strengthened his
adherence to the consolations of the Church.
But he was by no means decreased to
utter conventionality, as his tract On the Convention
of Cintra (1808), a strongly worded protest against
the English betrayal of Portuguese and Spanish
allies to Napoleon, shows.
Significant passages in The Excursion, in which he
criticizes the new industrial forms of man's
inhumanity to man, witness this also.
Wordsworth's separation from Coleridge in 1810 deprived him of a powerful motivation to imaginative and intellectual alertness.
Wordsworth's meeting to the office of distributor of stamps for Westmoreland in 1813 relieved him of financial care, but it also dissipated his suspicion of the aristocracy and
helped him to become a confirmed Tory and a devout member of the Anglican Church.
Wordsworth's unabating feel affection for nature made him view the emergent industrial society with undisguished diffidence, but although he opposed the Reform Bill of 1832,
which, in his view, merely transferred political power from the landed to the manufacturing class, he never stopped pleading in favor of the victims of the factory system.
In 1843 he was appointed poet laureate. He died on April 23, 1850.
1.7 Further Reading
Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: A Biography (2 vols., 1957, 1965), is the standard work.
On the poet's personality, Herbert Read, Wordsworth (1930), and Wallace W. Douglas, Wordsworth: The Construction of a Personality (1968), are of interest.
General introductions to the poetry include Peter Burra, Wordsworth (1936); James C. Smith, A Study of Wordsworth (1944); Helen Darbishire, The Poet Wordsworth
(1950); John F. Danby, The Simple Wordsworth (1960); Frederick W. Bateson, Wordsworth: A Re-interpretation (2d ed. 1963); and Carl Woodring, Wordsworth (1965).
More specialized studies include David Ferry, The Limits of
Mortality (1959); Colin C. Clarke, Romantic Paradox: An
Essay on the Poetry of Wordsworth (1963); Geoffrey H.
Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964); David
Perkins, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity (1965);
Bernard Groom, The Unity of Wordsworth's Poetry (1966);
and James Scoggins, Imagination and Fancy:
Complementary Modes in the Poetry of Wordsworth (1966).
Important discussions of Wordsworth's philosophy are
Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art in
Their Historical Relation (1922); Raymond D. Havens, The
Mind of a Poet (1941); Newton P. Stallknecht, Strange
Seas of Thought: Studies in William Wordsworth's
Philosophy of Man and Nature (1945; 2d ed. 1958); Enid
Welsford, Salisbury Plain: A Study in the Development of
Wordsworth's Mind and Art (1966); and Melvin Rader,
Wordsworth: A Philosophical Approach (1967).
The poet's literary theories are discussed in Marjorie Greenbie, Wordsworth's Theory of Poetic Diction (1966), and his political outlook in Francis M. Todd, Politics and the Poet: A
Study of Wordsworth (1957), and in Amanda M. Ellis, Rebels and Conservatives: Dorothy and William Wordsworth and Their Circle (1968).
Analyses of individual works include Judson S. Lyon, The Excursion: A Study (1950); Abbie F. Potts, Wordsworth's Prelude: A Study of Its Literary Form (1953); Herbert
Lindenberger, On Wordsworth's Prelude (1963); John F. Danby, Wordsworth: The Prelude (1963); and Roger N. Murray, Wordsworth's Style: Figures and Themes in the 'Lyrical
Ballads' of 1800 (1967).
1.8 Early life and education
William Wordsworth was the second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, and was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth in Cumberland—part
of the scenic region in northwest England, the Lake District.
His sister, the writer and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptized together.
They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who would become a poet and enjoy nature with William and
Dorothy until he died in an 1809 shipwreck, from which only the captain escaped; and Christopher, the youngest, who would become an academician.
Their father was a legal representative of James
Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his
connections, lived in a large mansion in the
small town.
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Wordsworth, as with his siblings, had little
involvement with their father, and they would be
distant with him until his death in 1783.
Wordsworth's father, although infrequently
present, did teach him poetry, including that of
Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser, in addition to
allowing his son to rely on his own father's
library.
Beside with spending time reading in
Cockermouth, Wordsworth would also stay at his
mother's parents house in Penrith, Cumberland.
At Penrith, Wordsworth was exposed to the moors and was influenced by his experience with the landscape and was further turned toward nature by the harsh treatment he
received at the hands of his relatives.
Especially, Wordsworth could not get along with his grandparents and his uncle, and his hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide.
John Wordsworth sent William, after the death of their mother, in 1778, to Hawkshead Grammar School and Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire; she and William would not
meet again for another nine years. Although Hawkshead was Wordsworth's first serious experience with education, he had been taught to read by his mother and had attended a
tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth.
After the Cockermouth school, he was sent to a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families and taught by Ann Birkett, a woman who insisted on instilling in her
students traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day, and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both
the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school that Wordsworth was to meet the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who would be his future wife.
Wordsworth made his first appearance as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College,
Cambridge, and received his B.A. degree in 1791.
He returned to Hawkshead for his first two summer holidays, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape.
In 1790, he took a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland and Italy. His youngest brother,
Christopher, rose to be Master of Trinity College.
1.9 Relationship with Annette Vallon
Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France in November 1791 and became enthralled with the Republican movement.
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 the next year.
The conditions of his come back and his
subsequent behaviour raise doubts as to
his declared wish to marry Annette, but
he supported her and his daughter as
best he could in later life.
For the duration of this period, he wrote
his acclaimed "It is a beauteous evening,
calm and free," recalling his seaside walk
with his daughter, whom he had not seen
for ten years.
At the formation of this poem, he had
never seen his daughter before.
The occurring lines make known his deep love for both child and mother.
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 strong suggestions that Wordsworth may have been depressed and emotionally unsettled in the mid-1790s.
He then fell in love with Mrs. Gannon.
With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802 Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, visited Annette and Caroline in France and arrived at a mutually agreeable
settlement regarding Wordsworth's obligations.
1.10 First publication and Lyrical Ballads
In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" which is called the "manifesto" of English Romantic criticism, Wordsworth names his poems "experimental".
The year 1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poems with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches.
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He obtained a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert in
1795 so that he could pursue writing poetry.
That year, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in
Somerset.
The two poets rapidly developed a close friendship.
In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy,
progressed to Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few
miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey.
Collectively, 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 nor Coleridge as the author.
One of Wordsworth's most celebrated poems, "Tintern Abbey", was made public in the work, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere".
The second version, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as the author, and included a preface to the poems, which was significantly augmented in the 1802 edition.
This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is judged a central work of Romantic literary theory.
In it, Wordsworth talks about 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.
Here, Wordsworth gives his famous explanation of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility".
A fourth and last version of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805.
1.11 Germany and move to the Lake District
Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge toured to Germany in the autumn of 1798.
At the same time as Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the trip, its main effect on Wordsworth was to produce homesickness.
For the duration of 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 wrote a number of celebrated poems,
including "The Lucy poems".
He and his sister came back to England,
now to Dove Cottage in 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".
During this period, many of his poems
revolve around themes of death,
endurance, separation and grief.
1.12 Marriage and Children
In 1802, following returning from his trip to France with Dorothy to visit Annette and Caroline, Lowther's heir, William Lowther, 1st Earl of LonsdaleUHSDLGWKHǧ
debt owed to Wordsworth's father incurred through Lowther's failure to pay his aide.
Soon after that year, Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson.
Dorothy maintained to live with the couple and grew close to Mary.
The next year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, three of whom predeceased William and Mary:
John Wordsworth (June 18, 1803 - 1875). Married four times:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Isabella Curwen (d. 1848) had six children: Jane, Henry, William, John, Charles and Edward.
Helen Ross (d. 1854). No issue.
Mary Ann Dolan (d. after 1858) had one daughter Dora (b.1858).
Mary Gamble. No issue.
Dora Wordsworth (August 16, 1804 - July 9, 1847). Married Edward Quillinan
Thomas Wordsworth (June 15, 1806 - December 1, 1812).
Catherine Wordsworth (September 6, 1808 - June 4, 1812).
William "Willy" Wordsworth (May 12, 1810 - 1883). Married Fanny Graham and had four children: Mary Louisa, William, Reginald, Gordon.
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1.13 Autobiographical work and Poems in Two Volumes
Wordsworth had for years been making plans to create 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 declined to distribute such a personal work until he had completed the whole of The Recluse.
The death of his brother, John, in 1805 affected him
powerfully.
The foundation of Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances
as articulated in The Prelude and in such shorter works as
"Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey" has
been the source of much critical debate.
At the same time as it had long been supposed that
Wordsworth relied chiefly on Coleridge for philosophical
guidance, more recent scholarship has suggested that
Wordsworth's ideas may have been formed years before he
and Coleridge became friends in the mid 1790s.
At the same time as in Revolutionary Paris in 1792, the twenty-two year old Wordsworth made the acquaintance of the mysterious traveller John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822),
who was nearing the end of a thirty-years' peregrination from Madras, India, through Persia and Arabia, across Africa and all of Europe, and up through the fledgling United
States.
By the time of their union, Stewart had published an determined work of original materialist philosophy entitled The Apocalypse of Nature (London, 1791), to which many of
Wordsworth's philosophical sentiments are likely indebted.
In 1807, his Poems in Two Volumes were published, together with "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood".
Up to this face Wordsworth was known publicly only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this collection would cement his reputation.
Its response was lukewarm, on the other hand.
For a time (starting in 1810), Wordsworth and Coleridge were separated over the latter's opium addiction. Two of his children, Thomas and Catherine, died in 1812.
The next year, he received a meeting as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, and the £400 per year income from the post made him financially secure.
His family, together with Dorothy, moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside (between Grasmere and Rydal Water) in 1813, where he spent the rest of his life.
1.14 The Prospectus
In 1814 he made public The Excursion as the second part of the three-part The Recluse.
He had not finished the first and third parts, and never would.
He did, on the other hand, write a poetic Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he lays out the structure and intent of the poem.
The Prospectus encloses some of Wordsworth'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.
A number of modern critics recognize a decline in his
works beginning around the mid-1810s.
But this decline was possibly more a change in his lifestyle and beliefs, since most of the issues that differentiate his early poetry (loss, death, endurance, separation and
abandonment) were resolved in his writings.
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But, by 1820, he enjoyed the accomplishment accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works.
Subsequent the death of his friend the painter William Green in 1823, Wordsworth mended relations with Coleridge.
The two were completely reconciled by 1828, when they toured the Rhineland together.
Dorothy suffered from a rigorous 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 sustain.
1.15 The Poet Laureate and other honors
Wordsworth obtained an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from Durham University, and the same honor from Oxford University the next year.
In 1842 the administration awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300 a year.
With the death in 1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became the Poet Laureate.
At what time his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his
production of poetry came to a decline.
William Wordsworth died by re-aggravating a
container of pleurisy on April 23, 1850, and was
buried at St. Oswald's church in Grasmere.
His widow Mary published his long autobiographical
"poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude some months
after his death.
Though this failed to arouse great interest in 1850, it
has since come to be recognized as his masterpiece.
2. Context
William Wordsworth was born on April 7th, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England.
Young William’s parents, John and Ann, died for the period of his boyhood.
Raised in the middle of the mountains of Cumberland alongside the River Derwent, Wordsworth grew up in a rural society, and spent a enormous deal of his time
playing outdoors, in what he would later remember as a pure communion with nature.
In the early 1790s William lived for a time in France, then in the grip of the aggressive Revolution; Wordsworth’s philosophical sympathies lay with the
revolutionaries, but his loyalties lay with England, whose monarchy he was not prepared to see deposed.
St the same time as in France, Wordsworth had a long affair with Annette Vallon, with whom he had a daughter, Caroline.
A shortly voyage to France to meet Caroline, now a young girl, would inspire the great sonnet “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.”
The disorder and bloodshed of the Reign of
Terror in Paris drove William to philosophy books;
he was deeply troubled by the rationalism he
found in the works of thinkers such as William
Godwin, which clashed with his own softer, more
emotional considerate of the world.
In desolation, he gave up his pursuit of moral
questions.
In the mid-1790s, on the other hand,
Wordsworth’s growing sense of anguish forced
him to formulate his own understanding of the
world and of the human mind in more concrete
terms.
The hypothesis he produced, and the poetics he
invented to embody it, caused a revolution in
English literature.
Developed during his life, Wordsworth’s understanding of the human mind seems simple enough today, what with the advent of psychoanalysis and the general Freudian
reception of the significance of childhood in the adult psyche.
But in Wordsworth’s occasion, in what Seamus Heaney has called “Dr. Johnson’s supremely adult eighteenth century,” it was shockingly unlike anything that had been proposed
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before.
Wordsworth supposed (as he expressed in poems such as the “Intimations of Immortality” Ode) that, upon being born, human beings move from a perfect, idealized realm into the
imperfect, un-ideal earth.
As children, some reminiscence of the former purity and glory in which they lived remains, most excellent perceived in the solemn and joyous relationship of the child to the
beauties of nature.
But as children produce older, the memory fades, and the supernatural of nature dies.
Still, the memory of childhood can offer an significant consolation, which brings with it almost a kind of re-access to the lost purities of the past.
And the growing mind develops the ability to understand nature in human terms, and to see in it metaphors for human life, which compensate for the loss of the direct
association.
Freed from monetary worries by a legacy left to him
in 1795, Wordsworth moved with his sister Dorothy
to Racedown, and then to Alfoxden in Grasmere,
where Wordsworth could be closer to his friend and
fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Collectively, Wordsworth and Coleridge began work
on a book called Lyrical Ballads, first published in
1798 and reissued with Wordsworth’s monumental
preface in 1802.
The publication of Lyrical Ballads symbolizes a
marker moment for English poetry; it was unlike
anything that had come before, and paved the way
for everything that has come after.
According to the theory that poetry resulted from the “spontaneous overflow” of emotions, as Wordsworth wrote in the preface, Wordsworth and Coleridge made it their task to
write in the simple language of common people, telling concrete stories of their lives.
According to this hypothesis, poetry originated in “emotion recollected in a state of tranquility”; the poet then surrendered to the sentiment, so that the quiet dissolved, and the
emotion remained in the poem.
This unambiguous emphasis on feeling, simplicity, and the pleasure of beauty over rhetoric, ornament, and formality changed the course of English poetry, replacing the elaborate
classical forms of Pope and Dryden with a new Romantic sensibility.
Wordsworth’s most significant legacy, besides his beautiful, timeless poems, is his launching of the Romantic era, opening the gates for later writers such as John Keats, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron in England, and Emerson and Thoreau in America.
2.1 French Revolution
Subsequent the triumph of Lyrical Ballads and his subsequent poem The Prelude, a massive autobiography in verse form, Wordsworth moved to the stately house at
Rydal Mount where he lived, with Dorothy, his wife Mary, and his children, until his death in 1850.
Wordsworth became the central power in English poetry while still quite a young man, and he lived to be quite old; his later years were marked by an increasing
aristocratic temperament and a general alienation from the younger Romantics whose work he had inspired.
Byron, the only significant poet to become more admired
than Wordsworth during Wordsworth’s lifetime, in
particular saw him as a kind of sell-out, writing in his
sardonic preface to Don Juan that the once-liberal
Wordsworth had “turned out a Tory” at last.
The most recent decades of Wordsworth’s life, on the
other hand, were spent as Poet Laureate of England,
and until his death he was widely considered the most
important author in England.
Looking back to his early radical years from his conservative middle age, the English poet Robert Southey (1774–1843) declared that few persons but those who have lived in it
can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it.
Aged things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the renaissance of the human race.
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