(Lyrical Ballads constituted a quiet poetic revolution, bo...)
Lyrical Ballads constituted a quiet poetic revolution, both in its attitude to its subject-matter and its anti-conventional language. Those volumes and Wordsworth's and Coleridge's other major poems were central to the Romantic period and remain classic texts in our own time. Wordsworth focuses on the essential passions of the heart and achieves a penetrating insight into love and death, solitude, and community. Coleridge explores a more fantastic and dreamlike imagination and also writes poems of quiet, conversational meditation.
William Wordsworth was a British early leader of romanticism in English poetry, who ranks as one of the greatest lyric poets in the history of English literature. His Lyrical Ballads, written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement. Among his other works are Guide to the Lakes, Poems, in Two Volumes, French Revolution, The Prelude, The Excursion, Peter Bell and The White Doe of Rylstone.
Background
William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumbria, England. He was the second of the five children of John Wordsworth, attorney and agent to Sir James Lowther (afterwards first Earl of Lonsdale). William's ancestry on his father's side was from Yorkshire. His mother was Anne Cookson of Penrith.
Education
In 1779 Wordsworth was sent to the grammar school at Hawkshead in the Furness district of North Lancashire. Here he received an excellent education in classics and mathematics and read much English poetry, some of it was lent to him by his master, William Taylor of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Here he was also able to indulge his love of wandering, while his delight in wild nature, nourished by his very acute powers of sight and hearing, became a source of joy and visionary ecstasy, strengthened by fear and awe.
In 1787 William entered St. John's College, Cambridge, where he spent his time chiefly in reading English literature and learning Italian.
In November 1791 the future author left for France, settling in Orléans to learn French.
Wordsworth received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from Durham University, and the same honour from Oxford University the next year.
In 1792 Wordsworth published two poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, the latter an account of his walking tour with Jones, written in France and colored by his revolutionary enthusiasm. He also wrote but did not publish a prose "Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff," in which his hatred of war and his sympathy for the sufferings of the poor are eloquently expressed, and a long poem called "Salisbury Plain" (later "Guilt and Sorrow") where this sympathy is given narrative form.
The outbreak of war between England and France in February 1793 preyed upon his mind and threw him into a prolonged state of depression and suffering. This was partially relieved by studying William Godwin's Political Justice, which advocated total rejection of the affections as the basis of conduct and reliance on "reason" alone. In 1795 he had several meetings with Godwin in London.
This timely gift enabled him to live in frugal independence of a profession and to devote his life to poetry. From 1795 to 1797 he lived with his only sister Dorothy, with whom he enjoyed perfect communion of spirit, at Racedown, a house in Dorset lent him by John Pinney of Bristol. Here, supported by Dorothy's faith and encouragement, he overcame his depression and began to write great poetry. He first wrote a tragedy, "The Borderers," really an exposure of the dangers of Godwin's rationalism, which he now knew to be mistaken. His true feelings were expressed in a poem in blank verse called "The Ruined Cottage," the story of a poor woman, which later became the first book of The Excursion.
In July 1797 the Wordsworths moved to Alfoxden, in the Quantock Hills of Somersetshire, in order to live near Samuel Taylor Coleridge at Nether Stowey. The year spent there in close association with Coleridge is famous for the production of a small volume of poems, called Lyrical Ballads, containing "The Ancient Mariner," by Coleridge, and "The Idiot Boy," "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," "The Thorn," and "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," together with several other short poems, by Wordsworth. The volume was published anonymously by Joseph Cottle in Bristol in September 1798. Coleridge also urged Wordsworth to write a long "philosophical" poem on "Man, Nature and Society," to be called The Recluse. Wordsworth began with enthusiasm, but could not decide on a plan for it. In fact, he never wrote more of it than the introduction, "On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life"; his autobiographical poem, The Prelude (1798 - 1805); and several years later, The Excursion (1806 - 1814). At Alfoxden also he wrote, but did not publish, Peter Bell.
In September 1798 the Wordsworths went with Coleridge to Germany. At Goslar, Wordsworth, as a preparation for writing The Recluse, wrote in blank verse an account of his experiences in boyhood as revealed to him in his communings with nature. This afterwards became the first book of The Prelude. He also wrote many shorter poems, including the "Lucy" cycle and "Ruth." On returning to England in May 1799, the Wordsworths spent seven months with their friends Mary Hutchinson and her brother Tom at Sockburnon-Tees. Here Wordsworth continued the "poem on his own life."
In December 1799 he and Dorothy settled in a cottage at Town End, Grasmere, Westmorland - a home chosen entirely for the loveliness of its surroundings. In January 1801 he published a second volume of Lyrical Ballads, containing his narrative pastorals written at Grasmere, "The Brothers," "Michael," and a long preface in which Wordsworth discussed the nature of poetic inspiration, the function of the poet, and the subject matter and style of true poetry. Coleridge did not contribute any poems to this volume, which, with the earlier volume, was published under Wordsworth's name only, by Thomas Norton Longman.
The winter and spring of 1802 was a very active poetical period; he then wrote "To the Cuckoo," the three "Butterfly" poems, "I wandered lonely as a cloud," "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," and "Resolution and Independence."
In Grasmere Allan Bank Wordsworth wrote a good deal of The Excursion (begun 1806 at Town End) and several prose essays. Of these the most celebrated is his pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra (1808 - 1809), inspired by his sympathy for the Spanish people under the tyranny of Napoleon and his indignation at England's desertion of them. He also wrote the "Essay on Epitaphs," the first part of which appeared in Coleridge's periodical The Friend in 1809; and in 1810 he wrote anonymously an introduction to Select Views of the Lake District, a book of drawings by the Rev. Joseph Wilkinson. This introduction was reprinted in 1822 as Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England.
The Wordsworths finally left Grasmere in May 1813 and settled at Rydal Mount, two miles nearer Ambleside. Here they remained for the rest of their lives. This period of Wordsworth's life was darkened first by a breach (1810 - 1812) in his friendship with Coleridge, arising out of some foolish indiscretions of their common friend, Basil Montagu; and then by the deaths (in June and December 1812) of his children Catherine and Thomas. In 1813 he was appointed (through the influence of Lord Lonsdale) Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland and part of Cumberland - a government post involving the supervision of the issue of revenue stamps and the dispatching of accounts and money to London. He was thus able to make provision for the proper support of his family, in days of severely rising prices. He engaged the services of a clerk, John Carter, who looked after the accounts, but Wordsworth's post entailed a good deal of traveling over his district and was by no means a sinecure. He held it until 1842, when he received a civil-list pension of £300 a year.
In 1805 Wordsworth completed the "poem on his own life," The Prelude, but he scrupulously revised it between 1832 and 1839, softening some of the more forthright expressions and introducing here and there more definitely Christian sentiments. In 1807 he published Poems in Two Volumes, containing the sonnets "dedicated to National Independence and Liberty," written between 1802 and 1804: the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," the "Ode to Duty," and many of his greatest lyrics. The Excursion, which he regarded as a "portion of The Recluse," was published in 1814, and was followed in 1815 by The White Doe of Rylstone (written 1807 - 1808) and by the first collected edition of his poems, Miscellaneous Poems, in two volumes (a third volume was added in 1820).
In 1816 he published a Thanksgiving Ode on the victorious end of the war, and also Letter to a Friend of Burns - an eloquent attack on the mean insinuations made by Robert Burns' biographers. In 1819 he published Peter Bell and The Waggoner (the latter written in 1806), and in 1820 a sonnet series, The River Duddon.
In 1822 came Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820, and Ecclesiastical Sketches, the latter a reflective history, in sonnet form, of the Church in England from the earliest times. Yarrow Revisited (1835) was mainly the fruit of his tours in Scotland in 1831 and 1833. His last separate publication was Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years, 1842, containing "The Borderers" and his early poem "Guilt and Sorrow."
Wordsworth's poetry met with much hostility from literary critics, particularly from Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review. Wordsworth despised this criticism; his faith in his own poetic genius was strong, but he readily accepted the suggestions of friends in altering and improving the text of his poems. His fame, however, steadily grew.
In the last years of Wordsworth's life, Isabella Fenwick took down from dictation his notes and reflections on his own poems. These notes were published by his nephew Christopher Wordsworth in Memoirs of William Wordsworth (1851). Wordsworth died peacefully after a short illness on April 23, 1850, at the age of eighty, at Rydal Mount, England.
It was the hope of his family that William would enter the Church, but to this he was averse. Thus Wordsworth shed his earlier tendency to a pantheistic idealization of nature and turned to a more sedate doctrine of orthodox Christianity. He was equally opposed to Catholic Emancipation and the secular movement in education.
Wordsworth's appointment 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.
Politics
While in France Wordsworth was converted to sympathy with the Revolution by Captain Michel Beaupuy, whom he afterward celebrated in The Prelude, Book VI. Wordsworth's early enthusiasm for the French Revolution was soon cooled and turned to horror by the Revolution's excesses and by the dictatorship of Napoleon.
The author took an active though anonymous part in the Westmorland election of 1818 when Henry Brougham (afterwards lord chancellor) challenged the Tory ascendancy of the Lowthers.
The poet became a great conservative patriot, strongly opposed to the Whig-Radical movement for parliamentary reform which he regarded as leading inevitably to the downfall of the monarchy and the overthrow of the constituted form of government. His real humanity and sympathy with the sufferings of the poor led him to criticize severely the Whig Poor Law of 1834 in a Postscript to the volume Yarrow Revisited. From 1838 to 1842 he did much to promote the Copyright Bill which Sergeant Talfourd sponsored in Parliament.
Views
William Wordsworth is the poet of Nature and Man. He believed that his vocation as a poet was to reveal nature as the source of joy and purest passion", not as an escape from human suffering and responsibility, but as a constant inspiration and encouragement, a bestower upon the humanity of those spiritual qualities of heart and mind which are eternal and universal, love, joy, fortitude, and compassion.
This conviction was the result, not of philosophical speculation in the abstract, but of Wordsworth's experiences in boyhood and youth which became vital to his development as a poet. His unusually acute faculties of sight and hearing in youth enabled him to feast on the beauty and strangeness of nature in a manner that frequently led him into trances or transports of delight, wonder, and sometimes terror. A common feature of them all is the vivid intensification of ordinary experience, the perception of colors and forms that are unknown to man, the sense of mystery and awe sometimes passing into hallucinatory visions, and the sense of interior mental unity with what he saw with his bodily eyes. Closely connected with this visionary state was his discovery of the strength of the active and creative imagination. He found that he possessed what he called a plastic power, a forming hand, through which he could give to natural objects a new and more splendid life.
Wordsworth always fully acknowledged his deep debt to his four great predecessors among English poets, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. His style bears constant traces of their influence, Milton's above all, whose sonnets originally inspired him to write sonnets himself. He had from his youth a deep admiration for the poetry of Chatterton, Burns, Langhorne, and Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, echoes from all of whom occur in his poems. He was, however, sparing of approval of the poetry of his contemporaries, Byron he regarded as a man of genius but morally depraved, Scott, he loved as a man but did not take very seriously as a poet.
Quotations:
"The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love."
"Wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoop. Than when we soar."
"Rest and be thankful."
"Come grow old with me. The best is yet to be."
"Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher."
"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."
"With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things."
"There is a comfort in the strength of love, Twill makes a thing endurable, which else would overset the brain, or break the heart."
"A mind forever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone."
"Love betters what is best."
"Habit rules the unreflecting herd."
"For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity."
"To begin, begin."
"I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man."
"Great God! I'd rather be a Pagan."
"Delight and liberty, the simple creed of childhood."
"The mind of man is a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells."
"The good die first, and they whose hearts are dry as summer dust, burn to the socket."
"Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man."
"Faith is a passionate intuition."
"What is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him, delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them."
"And homeless near a thousand homes I stood, And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food."
"Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them."
"A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable."
Personality
As an avid traveller William Wordsworth visited several European countries - Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, Holland, France and Ireland.
Quotes from others about the person
"The genius of Wordsworth is not dramatic but egocentric. His poems are not a report on the appearances of Nature, but a report on the effect of Nature upon the emotions of William Wordsworth." - G. M. Trevelyan.
"He looks like a man that one must not speak to unless one has some sensible thing to say. However he does occasionally converse cheerfully & well and when one knows how benevolent & excellent he is, it disposes one to be very much pleased with him." - Joanna Baillie.
"The genius of Wordsworth is not dramatic but egocentric. His poems are not a report on the appearances of Nature, but a report on the effect of Nature upon the emotions of William Wordsworth. And as the effect of Nature on Wordsworth is akin to her effect upon ourselves, he has become the prophet and priest of a great company." - G. M. Trevelyan.
Connections
When in 1791 William Wordsworth was in France, he formed a passionate attachment to a Frenchwoman, Annette Vallon. But before their child was born in December 1792, Wordsworth had to return to England and was cut off there by the outbreak of war between England and France. He was not to see his daughter Caroline until she was nine.
In 1802, during the short-lived Peace of Amiens, Wordsworth returned briefly to France, where at Calais he met his daughter and made his peace with Annette. He then returned to England to marry Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, and start an English family, which had grown to three sons, John, William, Thomas, and two daughters, Dora and Catherine by 1810.
William Wordsworth: A Life
Based on an intimate knowledge of the poet's manuscripts, on a fresh assessment of contemporary records, and a careful analysis of a wealth of new research, this vividly written volume presents the first serious biography of Wordsworth to appear in over twenty-five years.
1990
Wordsworth: A Life
In her book, Juliet Barker reveals not only the public figure who was courted and reviled in equal measure but also the complex, elusive, private man behind that image. Drawing on unpublished sources, she vividly re-creates the intimacy of Wordsworth's domestic circle, showing the love, laughter, loyalty, and tragedies that bound them together.
William Wordsworth
In this book, the life of William Wordsworth, the author of the renowned Lyrical Ballads is told through his poetry and personal communications, emphasizing his relationships with his mistress, sister, and wife, his politics, and travels.
William Wordsworth
Deploying a wide range of illustrations, from manuscripts in Wordsworth's hand in The British Library, and at the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, to photographs, portraits, and paintings in many other collections, Stephen Hebron discusses the life of a writer whose works had a tremendous influence on his contemporaries and later poets alike.