A
Quick Overview
William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, at Cockermouth, Cumberland, England and .died on April 23, 1850, Rydal Mount, Westmorland. He is honored by most as a major English Romantic poet and poet laureate of England (1843-50). His Lyrical Ballads (1798), written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement.
Wordsworth, William" Encyclopædia
Britannica Online.
<http://www.eb.com:180/bol/topic?eu=79549&sctn=1>
[Accessed July 1 1999].
Comments: A brillian author facinated with the complex relationships between men and women. There is a strong michious side in all he writes so that one is never sure how serious to think of him.
His
Life
Links
A
Small Selection of His Works
Links
Both the links and the details of Wordsworth's which follow this bar
come from Briticanica On-Line
Useful Biography of William Wordsworth
Selected
Poems of William Wordsworth
Richard
Darsie / University of California at Davis
Archive
of selected works by the Romantic poet.
Selected
Poetry and Prose of William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
University
of Toronto
Directory
of poetry and prose works by the poet and father of the British Romantic
movement, including the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads.
The
Wordsworth Trust
Information
on the life, times, and manuscripts of the British Romantic poet William
Wordsworth. Includes a detailed listing of current events and activities
of the organization.
The
Web Concordances and Workbooks
University
of Dundee, Scotland
Texts,
workbooks, and concordances for poems by prominent English Romantics. Includes
selected poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley; "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; John Keats's odes of 1819; William Blake's
collection Songs of Innocence and Experience; Lyrical Ballads
by William Wordsworth and Coleridge; and Gerald Manley Hopkins' first edition
of Poems.
By
the Seaside
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1835.
Composed
During a Storm
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1819.
Composed
Upon Westminster Bridge
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1807.
I
Know an Aged Man Constrained to Dwell
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1850.
I
Travelled Among Unknown Men
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1807.
I
Wandered Lonely As a Cloud
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1807.
It
is a Beauteous Evening
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1807.
Lines
Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1798.
London,
1802
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1807.
>Literature:
Countries,
Regions, Cultures:
England:
William
Wordsworth:
Works
Memory
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1827.
>Literature:
Countries,
Regions, Cultures:
England:
William
Wordsworth:
Works
Resolution
and Independence
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1807.
>Literature:
Countries,
Regions, Cultures:
England:
William
Wordsworth:
Works
She
Was a Phantom of Delight
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1807.
The
Bucket Air-The Flower of Dumblane
Poem
by Samuel Wordsworth.
The
Longest Day
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1820.
The
Power of Armies is a Visible Thing
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1815.
The
Rainbow
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1807.
The
Shepherd, Looking Eastward, Softly Said
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1815.
The
Solitary Reaper
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1807.
Written
in March
Poem
by William Wordsworth, 1807.
Wordsworth was born in the Lake District of northern England, the
second of five children of a modestly prosperous estate manager.
He lost his mother when he was 7 and his father when he was 13,
upon which the orphan boys were sent off by guardian uncles to a
grammar school at Hawkshead, a village in the heart of the Lake
District. At Hawkshead Wordsworth received an excellent
education in classics, literature, and mathematics, but the chief
advantage to him there was the chance to indulge in the boyhood
pleasures of living and playing in the outdoors. The natural scenery
of the English lakes could terrify as well as nurture, as Wordsworth
would later testify in the line "I grew up fostered alike by beauty and
by fear," but its generally benign aspect gave the growing boy the
confidence he articulated in one of his first important poems, "Lines
Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey . . . ," namely, "that
Nature never did betray the heart that loved her." (See nature.)Wordsworth moved on in 1787 to St. John's College, Cambridge.
Repelled by the competitive pressures there, he elected to idle his
way through the university, persuaded that he "was not for that hour,
nor for that place." The most important thing he did in his college
years was to devote his summer vacation in 1790 to a long walking
tour through revolutionary France. There he was caught up in the
passionate enthusiasm that followed the fall of the Bastille, and
became an ardent republican sympathizer. Upon taking his
Cambridge degree--an undistinguished "pass"--he returned in 1791
to France, where 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.The three or four years that followed his return to England were the
darkest of Wordsworth's life. Unprepared for any profession,
rootless, virtually penniless, bitterly hostile to his own country's
opposition to the French, he knocked about London in the company
of radicals like William Godwin and learned to feel a profound
sympathy for the abandoned mothers, beggars, children, vagrants,
and victims of England's wars who began to march through the
sombre poems he began writing at this time. This dark period ended
in 1795, when a friend's legacy made possible Wordsworth's
reunion with his beloved sister Dorothy--the two were never again
to live apart--and their move in 1797 to Alfoxden House, near
Bristol. There Wordsworth became friends with a fellow poet,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and they formed a partnership that would
change both poets' lives and alter the course of English poetry.Their partnership, rooted in one marvelous year (1797-98) in which
they "together wantoned in wild Poesy," had two consequences for
Wordsworth. First it turned him away from the long poems on
which he had laboured since his Cambridge days. These included
poems of social protest like Salisbury Plain, loco-descriptive
poems such as An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches
(published in 1793), and The Borderers, a blank-verse tragedy
exploring the psychology of guilt (and not published until 1842).
Stimulated by Coleridge and under the healing influences of nature
and his sister, Wordsworth began in 1797-98 to compose the short
lyrical and dramatic poems for which he is best remembered by
many readers. Some of these were affectionate tributes to Dorothy,
some were tributes to daffodils, birds, and other elements of
"Nature's holy plan," and some were portraits of simple rural people
intended to illustrate basic truths of human nature.Many of these short poems were written to a daringly original
program formulated jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and
aimed at breaking the decorum of Neoclassical verse. These poems
appeared in 1798 in a slim, anonymously authored volume entitled
Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge's long poem "The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and closed with Wordsworth's
"Tintern Abbey." All but three of the intervening poems were
Wordsworth's, and, as he declared in a preface to a second edition
two years later, their object was "to choose incidents and situations
from common life and to relate or describe them . . . in a selection of
language really used by men, . . . tracing in them . . . the primary
laws of our nature." Most of the poems were dramatic in form,
designed to reveal the character of the speaker. The manifesto and
the accompanying poems thus set forth a new style, a new
vocabulary, and new subjects for poetry, all of them foreshadowing
20th-century developments.The second consequence of Wordsworth's partnership with
Coleridge was the framing of a vastly ambitious poetic design that
teased and haunted him for the rest of his life. Coleridge had
projected an enormous poem to be called "The Brook," in which he
proposed to treat all science, philosophy, and religion, but he soon
laid the burden of writing this poem upon Wordsworth himself. As
early as 1798 Wordsworth began to talk in grand terms of this
poem, to be entitled The Recluse. To nerve himself up to this
enterprise and to test his powers, Wordsworth began writing the
autobiographical poem that would absorb him intermittently for the
next 40 years, and which was eventually published in 1850 under
the title The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet's Mind. The Prelude
extends the quiet autobiographical mode of reminiscence that
Wordsworth had begun in "Tintern Abbey" and traces the poet's
life from his school days through his university life and his visits to
France, up to the year (1799) in which he settled at Grasmere. It
thus describes a circular journey--what has been called a long
journey home. But the main events in the autobiography are internal:
the poem exultantly describes the ways in which the imagination
emerges as the dominant faculty, exerting its control over the reason
and the world of the senses alike.The Recluse itself was never completed, and only one of its three
projected parts was actually written; this was published in 1814 as
The Excursion and consisted of nine long philosophical monologues
spoken by pastoral characters. The first monologue (Book I)
contained a version of one of Wordsworth's greatest poems, "The
Ruined Cottage," composed in superb blank verse in 1797. This
bleak narrative records the slow, pitiful decline of a woman whose
husband had gone off to the army and never returned. For later
versions of this poem Wordsworth added a reconciling conclusion,
but the earliest and most powerful version was starkly tragic.In the company of Dorothy, Wordsworth spent the winter of
1798-99 in Germany, where, in the remote town of Goslar, in
Saxony, he experienced the most intense isolation he had ever
known. As a consequence, however, he wrote some of his most
moving poetry, including the "Lucy" and "Matthew" elegies and early
drafts toward The Prelude. Upon his return to England,
Wordsworth incorporated several new poems in the second edition
of Lyrical Ballads (1800), notably two tragic pastorals of country
life, "The Brothers" and "Michael." These poems, together with the
brilliant lyrics that were assembled in Wordsworth's second verse
collection, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), help to make up what
is now recognized as his great decade, stretching from his meeting
with Coleridge in 1797 until 1808.One portion of a second part of The Recluse was finished in 1806,
but, like The Prelude, was left in manuscript at the poet's death.
This portion, Home at Grasmere, joyously celebrated
Wordsworth's taking possession (in December 1799) of Dove
Cottage, at Grasmere, Westmorland, where he was to reside for
eight of his most productive years. 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
and two daughters by 1810.In 1805 the drowning of Wordsworth's favorite brother, John, the
captain of a sailing vessel, gave Wordsworth the strongest shock he
had ever experienced. "A deep distress hath humanized my Soul,"
he lamented in his "Elegiac Stanzas" on Peele Castle. Henceforth he
would produce a different kind of poetry, defined by a new
sobriety, a new restraint, and a lofty, almost Miltonic elevation of
tone and diction. Wordsworth appeared to anticipate this turn in
"Tintern Abbey," where he had learned to hear "the still, sad music
of humanity," and again in the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
(written in 1802-04; published in Poems, in Two Volumes). The
theme of this ode is the loss of his power to see the things he had
once seen, the radiance, the "celestial light" that seemed to lie over
the landscapes of his youth like "the glory and freshness of a dream."
Now, in the Peele Castle stanzas, he sorrowfully looked back on
the light as illusory, as a "Poet's dream," as "the light that never was,
on sea or land." (See "Ode: Intimations of Immortality".)These metaphors point up the differences between the early and the
late Wordsworth. It is generally accepted that the quality of his
verse fell off as he grew more distant from the sources of his
inspiration and as his Anglican and Tory sentiments hardened into
orthodoxy. Today many readers discern two Wordsworths, the
young Romantic revolutionary and the aging Tory humanist, risen
into what John Keats called the "Egotistical Sublime." Little of
Wordsworth's later verse matches the best of his earlier years.In his middle period Wordsworth invested a good deal of his
creative energy in odes, the best known of which is "On the Power
of Sound." He also produced a large number of sonnets, most of
them strung together in sequences. The most admired are the
Duddon sonnets (1820), which trace the progress of a stream
through Lake District landscapes and blend nature poetry with
philosophic reflection in a manner now recognized as the best of the
later Wordsworth. Other sonnet sequences record his tours through
the European continent, and the three series of Ecclesiastical
Sketches (1822) develop meditations, many sharply satirical, on
church history. But the most memorable poems of Wordsworth's
middle and late years were often cast in elegaic mode. They range
from the poet's heartfelt laments for two of his children who died in
1812--laments incorporated in The Excursion--to brilliant lyrical
effusions on the deaths of his fellow poets James Hogg, George
Crabbe, Coleridge, and Charles Lamb.In 1808 Wordsworth and his family moved from Dove Cottage to
larger quarters in Grasmere, and five years later they settled at
Rydal Mount, near Ambleside, where Wordsworth spent the
remainder of his life. In 1813 he accepted the post of distributor of
stamps for the county of Westmorland, an appointment that carried
the salary of £400 a year. Wordsworth continued to hold back
from publication The Prelude, Home at Grasmere, The
Borderers, and Salisbury Plain. He did publish Poems, in Two
Volumes in 1807; The Excursion in 1814, containing the only
finished portions of The Recluse; and the collected Poems of 1815,
which contained most of his shorter poems and two important
critical essays as well. Wordsworth's other works published during
middle age include The White Doe of Rylstone (1815), a poem
about the pathetic shattering of a Roman Catholic family during an
unsuccessful rebellion against Elizabeth I in 1569; a Thanksgiving
Ode (1816); and Peter Bell (1819), a poem written in 1798 and
then modulated in successive rewritings into an experiment in
Romantic irony and the mock-heroic and coloured by the poet's
feelings of affinity with his hero, a "wild and woodland rover." The
Waggoner (1819) is another extended ballad about a North
Country itinerant.Through all these years Wordsworth was assailed by vicious and
tireless critical attacks by contemptuous reviewers; no great poet
has ever had to endure worse. But finally, with the publication of
The River Duddon in 1820, the tide began to turn, and by the
mid-1830s his reputation had been established with both critics and
the reading public.Wordsworth's last years were given over partly to "tinkering" his
poems, as the family called his compulsive and persistent habit of
revising his earlier poems through edition after edition. The Prelude,
for instance, went through four distinct manuscript versions
(1798-99, 1805-06, 1818-20, and 1832-39) and was published
only after the poet's death in 1850. Most readers find the earliest
versions of The Prelude and other heavily revised poems to be the
best, but flashes of brilliance can appear in revisions added when the
poet was in his seventies.Wordsworth succeeded his friend Robert Southey as Britain's poet
laureate in 1843 and held that post until his own death in 1850.
Thereafter his influence was felt throughout the rest of the 19th
century, though he was honoured more for his smaller poems, as
singled out by the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold, than for his
masterpiece, The Prelude. In the 20th century his reputation was
strengthened both by recognition of his importance in the Romantic
movement and by an appreciation of the darker elements in his
personality and verse.William Wordsworth was the central figure in the English Romantic
revolution in poetry. His contribution to it was threefold. First, he
formulated in his poems and his essays a new attitude toward
nature. This was more than a matter of introducing nature imagery
into his verse; it amounted to a fresh view of the organic relation
between man and the natural world, and it culminated in metaphors
of a wedding between nature and the human mind, and beyond that,
in the sweeping metaphor of nature as emblematic of the mind of
God, a mind that "feeds upon infinity" and "broods over the dark
abyss." Second, Wordsworth probed deeply into his own
sensibility as he traced, in his finest poem, The Prelude, the "growth
of a poet's mind." The Prelude was in fact the first long
autobiographical poem. Writing it in a drawn-out process of
self-exploration, Wordsworth worked his way toward a modern
psychological understanding of his own nature, and thus more
broadly of human nature. Third, Wordsworth placed poetry at the
centre of human experience; in impassioned rhetoric he pronounced
poetry to be nothing less than "the first and last of all knowledge--it
is as immortal as the heart of man," and he then went on to create
some of the greatest English poetry of his century. It is probably safe
to say that by the late 20th century he stood in critical estimation
where Coleridge and Arnold had originally placed him, next to John
Milton--who stands, of course, next to William Shakespeare.
(S.M.P.)Bibliography
The definitive biography of Wordsworth is the magisterial work by
Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (1989). The second
half of the 20th century witnessed a rich profusion of books on
Wordsworth and his art. Of these, the following deserve mention:
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787-1814 (1964,
reissued 1987); W.J.B. Owen, Wordsworth as Critic (1969);
Jonathan Wordsworth, The Music of Humanity: A Critical Study
of Wordsworth's Ruined Cottage (1969); M.H. Abrams, Natural
Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic
Literature (1971); Jared R. Curtis, Wordsworth's Experiments
with Tradition: The Lyric Poems of 1802 (1971); Richard J.
Onorato, The Character of the Poet: Wordsworth in The
Prelude (1971); Stephen Maxfield Parrish, The Art of the Lyrical
Ballads (1973); Paul D. Sheats, The Making of Wordsworth's
Poetry, 1785-1798 (1973); James H. Averill, Wordsworth and
the Poetry of Human Suffering (1980); James K. Chandler,
Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and
Politics (1984); Kenneth R. Johnston, Wordsworth and The
Recluse (1984); and Thomas McFarland, William Wordsworth:
Intensity and Achievement (1992). To these book-length studies
may be added five important collections of critical essays: Jonathan
Wordsworth (ed.), Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies in Memory
of John Alban Finch (1970); M.H. Abrams (ed.), Wordsworth:
A Collection of Critical Essays (1972); Kenneth R. Johnston and
Gene W. Ruoff (eds.) The Age of William Wordsworth (1987);
Kenneth R. Johnston et al. (eds.), Romantic Revolutions:
Criticism and Theory (1990); and Pauline Fletcher and John
Murphy (eds.), Wordsworth in Context (1992).
"Wordsworth, William" Encyclopædia
Britannica Online.
