William Wordsworth, (born April 7, 1770, Cockermouth, Cumberland, England—died April 23, 1850, Rydal Mount, Westmorland), English poet whose Lyrical Ballads (1798), written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement.
Early life and education
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.”
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 lived in 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.
The great decade: 1797–1808
While living with
Dorothy at Alfoxden House, Wordsworth became friends with a fellow poet,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They formed a partnership that would change
both poets’ lives and alter the course of English poetry.
Coleridge and Lyrical Ballads
The
partnership between Wordsworth and Coleridge, 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 Recluse and The Prelude
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.
A turn to the elegiac
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.”
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 elegiac 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.
Late work
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.
William Wordsworth, engraving, 1833.© Photos.com/Thinkstock
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 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.
Assessment
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.
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