Poets - 08 - William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

William Wordsworth the great Romantic English poet was born in England’s Lake District, the most beautiful region of the country. His father was a landed farmer. His mother died when he was eight. He, along with his three brothers, was sent to study at the excellent grammar school at Hawks Head, in the Lake District.

There he grew up free to wonder through the beautiful countryside hiking and skating. These early opportunities to associate with nature had a profound effect on much of Wordsworth’s poetry. He received a fine education, both at the grammar school and at Cambridge University. The year he graduated from Cambridge was 1791.

In 1791 he left for France and spent one year there, supporting the French Revolution. He interpreted it as championing the cause of human liberty. In France he fell in love with a pretty French girl Annette Vallon, but lack of money forced him to postpone the marriage, leave her, and return to England.

Once in England the guilt over his inability to marry Annette, unhappiness at not finding a suitable employment and the growing certainty that the French Revolution not the example for humankind that once he had believed, brought Wordsworth to the brink of mental collapse. He fell into a period of deep depression.

In 1795 he recovered a little and moved into a small cottage in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy. Soon afterwards he met poet Samuel Tailor Coleridge and this meeting resulted in what is certainly the most significant friendship in all of English Literature. With the support and companionship of Coleridge and Dorothy, Wordsworth fully recovered from the despair that had engulfed him for several years.

‘All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. This remark occurs in the Wordsworth’s preface to ‘Lyrical Ballads’ first published in 1798. That book is the cornerstone of English Romanticism whose traits are spontaneity, power and emotion. Wordsworth rebelled consciously and consistently against the demands of neoclassicism.

Wordsworth’s preface, written for the second edition of ‘Lyrical Ballads’ in 1800, explains the principles underlying his and Coleridge’s new approach to poetry and thus announced the advent of a new literary age.

To Wordsworth poetry was more properly regarded as people speaking to people in whatever form might be, suitable to a particular occasion. Wordsworth, in particular, called for the use of natural common place language in literary works.

Unlike the neoclassicists like Dryden, Pope, and Johnson Wordsworth was convinced of the importance of subjectivity in poetry. He believed that poetry ‘takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.’ In other words, true poetry, conceived in spontaneous emotion, takes on meaning and shape as the poet contemplates the subject.

‘Poetry reflects the poet’s subjective reactions and reasoned reflections’ once Wordsworth asserted. ‘Poets should write to humble and rustic people whose feelings are genuine and unspoiled, living out their lives close to nature’. He focused on the ‘natural’ and ‘ordinary’, in an attempt to explore the relationship between nature and our inner life.

Wordsworth spent most of his long life back in the beautiful Lake District with his wife Mary who was known to him from childhood, and his dedicated sister Dorothy. His greatest poems had been written between 1797 and 1807. They appear in the anthology ‘Poems’, in Two Volumes.

In 1843 he was appointed poet laureate ‘The World Is Too Much With Us’, ‘The Daffodils’, ‘London 1802’, ‘It Is a Beauteous Evening Calm and Free’ and ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ are among his famous poems.

William Wordsworth passed away in 1850 in the Lake District.

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