William Wordsworth

English poet

• Born: April 7, 1770
• Birthplace: Cockermouth, Cumberland, England
• Died: April 23, 1850
• Place of death: Rydal Mount, Westmorland, England

As one of the first and probably the greatest of the English Romantic poets, Wordsworth redirected the literary trends of the time. His most important poems present a vision of the expanded human mind in creative interplay with the external world.

Early Life

Born on the borders of the Lake District in northwest England, William Wordsworth was the second of five children born to John and Ann Wordsworth. His mother died when he was eight, and when he was nine he was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School, thirty-five miles to the south, on the shores of Esthwaite Lake. Wordsworth loved the Lakeland countryside, where he was free to roam for long periods, as he was later to record in The Prelude: Or, The Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850). He was an adventurous, imaginative, strong-minded, and rebellious boy, who was also given to periods of solitude. His was a happy childhood, though his father also died when Wordsworth was young.

In 1787, Wordsworth entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, but the tall, lean, and dour northerner, his long face usually serious in expression, his clothes plain and unsophisticated, and his manner awkward, neither excelled as a scholar nor fitted smoothly into fashionable social circles. He later wrote in The Prelude that he believed that he was “not for that hour,/ Nor for that place,” but at the time he had no clear idea of his vocation.

During his summer vacation in 1790, Wordsworth went on a walking tour with his friend Robert Jones through France and the Alps. The following year, after receiving his degree from Cambridge, he climbed Mount Snowdon, the highest peak in Great Britain. It was an important event because he would later incorporate the story of the climb, giving it great symbolic importance, in the final book of The Prelude.

In November, 1791, Wordsworth returned to France, where the French Revolution was at its height. Stimulated by his friendship with the Republican soldier Michel Beaupuy, Wordsworth enthusiastically embraced the revolutionary cause, later writing of “France standing on the top of golden hours/ And human nature seeming born again.”

Wordsworth also had a love affair with a Frenchwoman, Annette Vallon, from Orleans, who later gave birth to his child, Caroline. He returned to England in December, 1792, and one month later his first published poetry, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches , appeared. For the next two years, he lived mainly in London and was involved in radical politics. Wordsworth was appalled that England had gone to war against revolutionary France, but over the next few years, as he watched the revolution turn into tyranny and wars of conquest, he was thrown into a state of moral confusion.

In 1795, Wordsworth’s financial position eased when a young friend, Raisley Calvert, died and left him a legacy of nine hundred pounds. He and his devoted sister, Dorothy, rented a cottage in Racedown, in the southwest county of Dorset, where Wordsworth recovered his peace of mind. He also met two young poets, Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The friendship with Coleridge, which became fully established in 1797, coincided with the beginning of a golden decade in which Wordsworth was to write most of his greatest poems.

Life’s Work

Coleridge, a great poet in his own right, worshipped Wordsworth, and Wordsworth, in his turn, was stimulated by the range of Coleridge’s learning and the depth of his critical insight. It was Coleridge who helped to shape Wordsworth’s conception of his own poetic vocation. For several years, the two were almost daily in each other’s company, and in 1798 they published anonymously a joint collection (although Wordsworth was the chief contributor) entitled Lyrical Ballads . It did not win favorable reviews and did not sell many copies, but it later came to be recognized as one of the landmarks in the history of English literature. Wordsworth had developed a new idea of what poetry could be about. He wrote about ordinary events in the lives of ordinary people: simple country folk and children mainly, but also social outcasts and misfits. Not only did this break all the neoclassical rules about the proper subject matter of poetry, but, in using simple, nonliterary language, what he called the common language of men, Wordsworth also challenged the conventional wisdom regarding poetic diction.

In December, 1799, following a brief visit to Germany with Coleridge, Wordsworth and Dorothy moved to Dove Cottage, in the Lake District village of Grasmere. Coleridge and his wife followed them to nearby Keswick. The Wordsworths were to live in Dove Cottage for nearly ten years; it was to be the most creative period of the poet’s life. This was in part a result of the serenity and happiness of domestic life at Dove Cottage; Dorothy was a devoted helper, and Wordsworth’s marriage to his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson in 1802 increased his tranquillity. It was an ideal environment for writing. During this period, Wordsworth completed an early version of The Prelude, planned a long poem titled The Recluse (1888), and wrote most of Home at Grasmere (published in 1888 as part of The Recluse), as well as Michael (1800) and a preface to Lyrical Ballads, which was published in a new and expanded edition in 1801. The following year, he wrote the first four stanzas of the magnificent Ode: Intimations of Immortality (1807).

In the same year, tragedy struck the close-knit family when Wordsworth’s brother, John, a naval captain, was drowned when his ship was wrecked in a storm. Wordsworth and Dorothy were grief-stricken; the 1807 “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle” records Wordsworth’s feelings at the time. In 1805, the second version of The Prelude was completed, although Wordsworth never gave the poem a title, referring to it only as the poem about his life.

Now in midlife, Wordsworth was undergoing a profound change of outlook. Formerly a supporter of the French Revolution and a political radical, he now began to lean heavily toward conservatism in politics and religion, giving his support to the governing Tory Party, the landed aristocracy, as well as the Church of England. As an established man with family responsibilities (by 1810, he had become the father of five children), he felt safer with the status quo. “Ode to Duty” is a sign of the stern, unbending Wordsworth that the Victorian age was to admire. In addition, Wordsworth was aware that he had lost the visionary power with which, as a youth, he had communed with nature, and which had inspired so much of his best poetry. The effects of the loss, as well as the renewed strength that he had found, is recorded in Ode: Intimations of Immortality and the “Elegiac Stanzas.”

In 1808, Dove Cottage was becoming overcrowded, and the Wordsworths moved to larger accommodations at Allan Bank in the same town, where Coleridge stayed with them for long periods. The famous friendship, however, was showing signs of strain. Coleridge’s health was deteriorating, largely through his dependence on opium, and he seemed incapable of sustained and productive work. In 1810 came an open quarrel, when some critical remarks made by Wordsworth about his friend got back to Coleridge. The quarrel was patched up eighteen months later, but the two were never to regain their former intimacy.

Tragedy struck the family again in 1812, when two of the Wordsworths’ children died in infancy. The following year, the family left Allan Bank for nearby Rydal Mount, where they were to stay for the remainder of their lives. Their financial security improved when Wordsworth accepted a government position as Distributor of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland, a post that confirmed the conservative trend in his life that had been apparent for at least a decade.

In 1814, Wordsworth published The Excursion , his first publication in seven years. Like Lyrical Ballads, however, it did not find favor with professional reviewers. In spite of their reservations about some aspects of his work, however, there was a growing recognition in literary circles that Wordsworth was one of the leading poets of the age and that some of his work was indeed the work of genius. When, in 1820, he published a series of sonnets, The River Duddon , he was, for the first time, universally acclaimed. Ironically, however, his golden years as a poet were behind him. Although he continued to write a large number of poems, little of the work of his later years retained the freshness, the visionary quality, of his early poems.

The remaining years of Wordsworth’s life were years of fame. There was a constant stream of distinguished visitors to Rydal Mount, as well as tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of the great man. In 1843, as the elder statesman of the British literary scene, he was appointed poet laureate. Four years later came a devastating personal blow when his daughter Dora died. Another tragedy was with Wordsworth constantly. Twelve years previously, his beloved sister Dorothy had become seriously ill, and she lived the last twenty years of her life as a physical invalid and mental child. Wordsworth nursed her devotedly until his death on April 23, 1850. The Prelude, which he had been revising on and off for forty years, was published posthumously, as he had wished. It is his greatest achievement as a poet.

Significance

William Wordsworth was at the forefront of the revolution in literature that took place when the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century gave way to the Romanticism of the early nineteenth. There were several major areas in which change took place. First, the Romantic age reestablished the importance of the imagination in the creative process, in contrast to neoclassicism, which had exalted the rational intellect. The power of the imagination gives the poet the ability to see the external world from a higher perspective. It reunites the perceiver and the perceived, subject and object, and creates a unity in diversity, in contrast to the tendency of the intellect to separate and compartmentalize. The imagination is central to Wordsworth’s design in The Prelude.

The Romantics also emphasized the importance of feeling and emotion and the spontaneity of the creative act. Poetry arises from the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” wrote Wordsworth in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, one of the central documents of English Romanticism. Emotional and intellectual crises became legitimate subjects for poetry (Wordsworth’s The Prelude is an excellent example). In part, this was a result of the highly exalted view of poetry and the poet. The poet is viewed as a seer (“I was a chosen son,” wrote Wordsworth in The Prelude), and poetry itself, according to Wordsworth, is “the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man.”

Other Romantics, younger men such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, were profoundly influenced by Wordsworth’s poetry and ideas. Although Wordsworth’s reputation went into a slight decline after his death, the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold emerged to champion his cause. Since then, he has not lost his high rank among the English poets, standing behind only John Milton and William Shakespeare. Although much of his later work is undistinguished, the serene and solemn majesty of the best portions of The Prelude remains unmatched in the language, and the great Ode: Intimations of Immortality, as many generations of readers have found, has enormous power to inspire, uplift, and console.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. William Wordsworth. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003. One in a series of books aimed at literature students. Contains an introductory essay by Bloom, a biography of Wordsworth, and essays aimed at introducing Wordsworth’s poetry to readers.

Darbishire, Helen. The Poet Wordsworth. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1950. Lucid, concise, and eloquent introduction to the poetry by a senior Wordsworth scholar.

Davies, Hunter. William Wordsworth: A Biography. New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1980. Written in an informal style for the general reader. Davies avoids discussion of the poetry, but the result is that his biography, although readable and accurate, fails to convey any sense of Wordsworth’s greatness.

Gill, Stephen, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. The fifteen essays in this compilation provide an excellent introduction to Wordsworth’s poetry. The essays include explorations of Wordsworth’s literary career, poetic craft, Wordsworth and Romanticism, and Wordsworth and America.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Wordsworth and the Victorians. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Examines how Wordsworth’s reputation flourished during the Victorian Era, and how his work influenced Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and other nineteenth century writers.

Hebron, Stephen. William Wordsworth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Concise 120-page overview of Wordsworth’s life, aimed at the general reader and student.

Moorman, Mary. William Wordsworth: A Biography. 2 vols. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1957, 1965. Moorman’s meticulous scholarship, and her sympathetic understanding of the poet, make this the standard biography.

Wordsworth, William. Letters of William Wordsworth: A New Selection. Edited by Alan G. Hill. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1984. Contains more than 160 of Wordsworth’s direct, matter-of-fact letters, revealing much about himself as man and poet, and about his relations with family and friends.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Poetical Works. Edited by Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. 5 vols. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1940-1949. The complete poetry. Classified according to Wordsworth’s own arrangement.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. Definitive edition of Wordsworth’s masterpiece. Format allows easy comparison of the 1805 version with the 1850 version. Includes contemporary responses to The Prelude and a selection of recent critical essays.

Wu, Duncan. Wordsworth: An Inner Life. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002. Traces how Wordsworth’s art developed between 1787 and 1813. Wu examines the impact of Wordsworth’s early childhood, particularly the delayed mourning of his parents’ deaths, on Wordsworth’s later poetry.