William wordsworth (1770-1850)

Wordsworth is the most influential representative of the Lake School Romantic trend. Wordsworth’s ideas concerning nature, the task of the poet and the essence of poetic composition have become a landmark in the history of English literature.

He was born in Cockermouth in West Cumberland just on the northern fringe of the English Lake District. His mother died when he was 8 and his father, when he was 13, leaving to his five children mainly the substantial sum owed him by Lord Lonsdale, whom he had served as attorney and as steward. The debt was paid only in 1802. Nevertheless, Wordsworth studied at Cambridge. In 1790 he and his college friend journeyed on foot through France and the Alps at the time when the French were celebrating the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. After graduating from Cambridge in 1791 he went to France to master the language and qualify as a travelling tutor. He became an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution which seemed to him to promise a “glorious renovation”. In France he had a love affair with Annette Vallon, the young people planned to marry, but after a daughter, Caroline, was born, lack of funds forced Wordsworth to go to England. The outbreak of the war between England and France made it impossible for him to rejoin Annette until they had drifted so for apart in sympathies (she was a Catholic and a Royalist) that a marriage seemed impossible. Wordsworth’s agonies of guilt, his divided loyalties between England and France, his gradual disillusionment with the course of the French Revolution brought him on a verge of an emotional breakdown. At this time his friend died and left Wordsworth a sum of money just sufficient to enable him to live by his poetry. He settled in a cottage at Racedown, Dorsetshire, with his sister, Dorothy, who was to become his confidante, inspirer, and secretary. At that time Wordsworth met Coleridge; two years later he moved to Somersetshire to be near Coleridge, who lived four miles away. Coleridge who had admired Wordsworth’s poems at Cambridge now hailed him unreservedly as “the best poet of the age”. The two men met almost daily, talked for hours about poetry, and composed prolifically. So close was their association that the same phrases can be found in poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge.

The result of their joined effort was a volume of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. No other book of poems in English more plainly announces a new literary departure. A famous critic and poet, William Hazlitt, said that when he heard Coleridge read some of these newly written poems aloud, “the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me”. In 1800 Wordsworth published under his own name a new edition, to which he added a second volume of poems. In his famous Preface to this edition, planned in close consultation with Coleridge, Wordsworth enunciated the principles of the new criticism that served as a rationale for the new poetry.

Late in 1799 Wordsworth and Dorothy moved back permanently to their native lakes, settling in Dove Cottage near Grasmere. Coleridge, following them, rented a cottage thirteen miles away. In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, whom he had known since childhood. The course of his life after that time was broken by various disasters: the drowning in 1805 of his favourite brother, John, a sea captain; the death of two of his five children in 1812; a growing estrangement from Coleridge; and from 1830s on, the physical and mental decline of Dorothy. His middle age, however, was the time of increasing prosperity and reputation. In 1843 he was appointed poet laureate.

Most of Wordsworth’s greatest poetry had been written by 1807, in his later years he became less innovative and more artistically conservative, although some masterpieces appeared in his middle and later life (e.g. Surprised by Joy or Extemplore Effusion).

Technically, Wordsworth was extremely versatile and he was accomplished in a number of verse forms, ranging from blank verse, sonnets and odes to ballads and delightfully simple lyrics. Wordsworth is frequently thought as a “nature poet”: his pantheistic philosophy led him to believe that man should enter into communion with nature. Since nature was an expression of God and was charged with His presence, Wordsworth believed it constituted a potential moral guide for those possessed of a “feeling heart”. This reverence for nature went hand in hand with a sympathy for the state of childhood: in terms reminiscent of Blake, he equalled childhood with innocence and imagination unspoilt by the “civilizing” tendencies of an adult, rational world. According to Wordsworth, the child possessed superior wisdom. He said: ”The child is the father of the man”. The subject of poetry was to consist of incidents and situations from common life”. By this Wordsworth meant “humble, rustic life since under those conditions Man is in closer contact with nature, and in this simple state the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity”. For Wordsworth memory was a key element in poetic composition. His famous premise that “all good poetry is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” meant that “the spontaneous overflow” occurs at the moment of composition, but only after the feelings have been worked out through a process of prior thought. For him it was “emotion recollected in tranquillity”.

Wordsworth’s masterpiece, The Prelude, was published only after his death in 1850. It is the most original long poem after Milton’s Paradise Lost. The title to the poem was given by the poet’s wife; Wordsworth himself had referred to it as “the poem to Coleridge”, “the poem on the growth of my mind”, and “the poem on my own poetical education”.

The narrator of the poem is the actual Wordsworth addressing himself to his friend Coleridge and to the English people of his own troubled age. He adopts a prophetic stance that goes back through Milton to the prophets of the Bible. And though the separate episodes are events from Wordsworth’s own life, they are interpreted in distant retrospect, recorded in sequence and shaped into a story of crisis and recovery from which the author emerges as a different self in a transformed world. He changes the Christian spiritual story in a radical way; what had earlier been the providence became the power of his own mind, which is capable of transforming the natural world with which it interacts; he calls this power “Imagination”. The Prelude has been called the greatest religious poem of the 19th century. Its religion, however, is the faith in the redeeming power of the mind of man, which, compared with the unchanging earth, is “In beauty exalted, as it is itself /Of quality and fabric more divine”.