William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 - 23 April 1850) was one of the leading English romantic poets. In 1798 he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the Lyrical Ballads, a work which was regarded at the time as revolutionary in style, with many of the poems using a language close to that of ordinary people instead of a poetic diction reminiscent of many poems of the 18th century. His long autobiographical poem The Prelude is widely regarded as a masterpiece. He also wrote a huge number of shorter poems and his nature poetry was a model for many English poets of the 19th century. He was poet laureate from 1843 until his death. He was one of the most prolific English poets, and, while he produced many undoubted masterpieces, many of his poems - particularly those of his later years - are less inspired.

Life

Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, and was the third son of an attorney, John Wordsworth. His mother died when he was eight, and his father died when he was thirteen. The children then came under the care of uncles. Wordsworth attended Hawkshead Grammar School. His first publication was when he was seventeen - a poem in The European Magazine. From 1787 to 1791 he studied at St John's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a BA. In 1790 he spent the summer vacation on a walking tour in France and Switzerland, and during this tour he witnessed the first stages of the French Revolution.

After leaving Cambridge he went to Blois in France, where he had an affair with Annette Vallon, who bore him a child called Ann Caroline. In 1793, following England's declaration of war against France, he returned to England. At this stage of his life he was a strong supporter of revolutionary ideas and of social justice. In 1793 he undertook another walking tour, this time in England, from Salisbury to North Wales, and en route saw Tintern Abbey for the first time. He was dismayed by the Terror in France, and renewed his hopes when Robespierre was guillotined in 1794. He retained his sympathies with the hopes of many of the French revolutionaries until the French occupied Switzerland in 1798.

He was short of money for much of his early life, but in 1795 received a bequest of £900 which enabled him to concentrate on a career as a poet and to create a home with his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was always very close (there have long been speculations that their relationship strayed beyond what was proper between brother and sister). They lived first in Dorset and then in Somerset, near Samuel Coleridge. Dorothy was a major influence on both poets. In 1798 the two poets published the Lyrical Ballads. In the autumn of that year, Wordsworth, his sister and Coleridge travelled to Germany, where Wordsworth began The Prelude. In 1799 William and Dorothy settled at Dove Cottage, Grasmere in the Lake District of N W England.

In 1802 the Peace of Amiens enabled William and Dorothy to visit Annette Vallon and his daughter. After his return, he married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, who agreed to Dorothy living with them. Mary bore him five children. There followed a long period of relative stability and happiness, despite the death of his brother John, a sailor, in 1805. Among the friends he made now was Sir Walter Scott. Always an inveterate walker, Wordsworth made a number of further walking tours, including of Scotland and (in 1828, with his daughter Dora and Coleridge) of the Rhineland.

In 1810 occurred a quarrel with Coleridge, and, while eventually the two poets to some extent patched things up, relations between them were never quite so cordial. In 1812 two of his children died.

Wordsworth's political sympathies changed following the rise of Napoleon, and he became a Tory: in the last years of his life he was very much a member of the conservative political establishment. In 1813 he was given a government sinecure - Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, with a £400 annual salary. This enabled Wordsworth and his household to move in 1813 to Rydal Mount, again in the Lake District. Later in his life other public recognition followed - honorary degrees from the universities of Durham in 1838 and Oxford in 1839, and a government pension of £300 a year from 1842. In 1843 he became poet laureate following the death of Robert Southey. He died at Rydal Mount on 27 April 1850 and was buried in the churchyard of St Oswald's Church, Grasmere.

Reception in his time

The critical reception of his poetry was initially, at best, mixed. The intentions behind the Lyrical Ballads were widely misunderstood, and some of his work was soon parodied. Lord Byron was among those out of sympathy with his style: in English Bards and Scots Reviewers he describes Wordsworth as showing that "prose is verse, and verse is merely prose", and calls him a "dull disciple" of Southey. But acceptance followed, and Wordsworth and Coleridge had a major influence on the following generation of English poets. John Keats revered him as a poet, but was shocked by his Tory sympathies. In his later years, Wordsworth was very much a Grand Old Man of English letters.

Early poetic aims

The initial critical hostility to the Lyrical Ballads (all but four of the poems in the volume being by him) led Wordsworth to include a preface in subsequent editions to explain his aims. He declared that he sought not just to use vernacular language but also to write about simple uneducated country people. "The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure." The preface contains a famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility".

In his concentration on nature, Wordsworth built on trends that had already started to emerge in English poetry, though his style was very different. The love of nature at its most sublime, of mountains and of wild scenery, was paralleled in the painting and was in contrast with the times of, for example, Alexander Pope, when what was admired was the taming of nature into landscaped gardens.

Poetry

The quality of Wordsworth's poetry is mixed, and, particularly in his later years, he wrote a large amount of fairly pedestrian verse. But at his best he could produce both successful longer poems and successful lyrics. Among his most famous poems are:

• The Prelude (two versions - 1805 and 1850), not published until shortly after his death. This is a long autobiographical poem which includes political and philosophical reflections and vivid descriptions of nature
• The Excursion (published in 1814), in nine books, a philosophical poem which shows his disillusion with the French Revolution
• The Lucy poems, a group of lyrics
• Many other lyrics, including My heart leaps up when I behold, Daffodils and The Solitary Reaper
• Resolution and Independence, an ode which is in many ways a description of Wordsworth's own early poetic aims
• Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
• Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, 13 July 1798
• Many sonnets, including Upon Westminster Bridge, The world is too much with us..., and Surprised by joy...