William Wordsworth
1770–1850
MAY 18,2024
BY NR.BALOCh1William Wordsworth was a key personality and significant thinker in English Romanticism, as well as one of its creators. He is recognized as a poet who explored spiritual and epistemological ideas, wrote on the interaction between humans and nature, and vehemently supported the use of everyday language and speech patterns in poetry. William Wordworth, the son of John and Ann Cookson Wordsworth, was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the English Lake District. Wordsworth would have a strong1 connection to this location for more than 200 years after his passing. When he was a young child in grammar school, he started writing poems. Prior to graduating from college, he took a walking trip of Europe, which strengthened his love for
Wordsworth developed a strong early affection for the "beautiful forms" of the natural world. The Derwent River, which ran beside the terraced garden beneath the spacious house whose tenancy John Wordsworth had acquired from his employer, the political tycoon and landowner Sir James Lowther, Baronet of Lowther (later Earl of Lonsdale), appears to have provided the Wordsworth children with a kind of pastoral paradise.
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William went to Ann Birkett's school at Penrith, where his maternal grandparents lived, then the grammar school next to Cockermouth Church. William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy had a close friendship that presumably started when they were students at Penrith together with Mary Hutchinson. This bond lasted a lifetime. A number of passages in The Prelude and shorter works, like the sonnet "Address from the Spirit of Cockermouth Castle," vividly evoke Wordsworth's early upbringing by the Derwent and his education at Cockermouth. The poet would also acquire a reservoir of imagery and sensory experience from his time in and around Hawkshead, where William and Richard Wordsworth started school in 1779. This would be useful throughout his literary career, but particularly in the "great decade" of
After getting lost on his way home from a business trip in December 1783, John Wordsworth was forced to spend a chilly night outside. Arriving home quite sick, he passed away on December 30. Even though they weren't with their sister, the boys eventually went to Hawkshead School together while residing in Ann Tyson's home. Despite his financial difficulties brought on by the protracted legal battle concerning Lord Lowther's debt to Wordsworth's estate, Wordsworth moved up to Cambridge in 1787 to take a sizar position at St. John's College. Wordsworth's college experience was not particularly brilliant, as he himself later stated. Wordsworth wrote about his impressions of Cambridge life and his evolving attitude toward his studies in the third book of The Prelude. In the course of his final
Wordsworth's poetry career began with this first journey to France and Switzerland, even though he had been writing verse from his days at Hawkshead Grammar School, encouraged by school headmaster William Taylor. He also developed his early political beliefs during this time, most notably his detest of tyranny. Over the ensuing years, these beliefs would undergo significant change, but they would never entirely disappear. Wordsworth was enthralled with both the striking natural beauty of the French countryside and mountains, as well as the revolutionary passion he discovered there—he and Jones arrived on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Wordsworth returned to England in October, studied for many months in London, received a pass degree from Cambridge in January 1791, and then journeyed to Jones's parents' house in North
Wordsworth's two early journeys to France left him with a strong enthusiasm for democracy, which is evident in his "Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff" (also known as "Apology for the French Revolution"). Wordsworth returned to France in November 1791 and attended Jacobin Club and National Assembly meetings. He met and fell in love with Annette Vallon in December. He also made good friends with Michel Beaupuy, an army officer who was philosophical and intelligent, at the start of 1792, and they spoke politics. Wordsworth had always been a natural democratic since he was a young child, and his experiences in revolutionary France only deepened and expanded his beliefs. Wordsworth's compassion for the people will endure even when his revolutionary fervor was replaced with the
Following the publication of a poem penned at Cambridge, An Evening Walk (1793), Wordsworth started work on the first comprehensive creative endeavors of his age, Descriptive Sketches, which was published in 1793, while he was still in France. He left France early in December 1792, having spent all of his money, just before Annette Vallon gave birth to his daughter Caroline. Once back in England, the young radical looked around for a career that fit him. He was a devout democrat and was hesitant to "vegetate in a paltry curacy," yet in May 1792, he had written to his friend William Matthews that he planned to be ordained the winter or spring after. Maybe because of this scheme, he was reading sermons in the early months of 1793 when he came upon one by Richard
By now his English relatives knew of his relationship with Annette Vallon, and he had lost all chance of getting into the Church. Either way, Wordsworth had been influenced greatly by the recently released Political Justice (1793) by atheist William Godwin. The young democratic poet responds indignantly against the powers of darkness, repression, and monarchy in "A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff." Its writing has some of Thomas Paine's revolutionary clarity. In reality, Wordsworth used Paine's comment, "If you had looked in the articles of the rights of man, you would have found your efforts superseded," to refute Bishop Watson's supplement. Perfect equality is required because liberty cannot exist without it.
One of the reasons "A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff" is so noteworthy is that Wordsworth appears to have started compromising on its principles almost immediately after he wrote them. Even though Wordsworth continued to be a staunch advocate of the French Revolution for the time being, Wordsworth's poetic side started to come through, leading him to reconsider his adherence to Godwin's rationalistic model of human behavior—which served as a major inspiration for Wordsworth's republicanism—between 1793 and 1796. It's unclear if "A Letter to Bishop the of Llandaff" was held back from publication due to caution or other factors. Wordsworth focused on poetry and created his own philosophy of human nature through poetic production, which was completely unrelated to Godwin's rationalism. While this
Wordsworth split his time between London and the Lake Country in 1794 and 1795. William and Dorothy Wordsworth moved into Racedown Lodge in Dorset in September 1795, and they stayed there for two years. Wordsworth stated in The Prelude that his sister "preserved me still / A poet" and "maintained a saving intercourse / With my true self." Wordsworth wrote The Borderers at Racedown, a tragedy in which he fully accepted Godwin's theory and ultimately rejected it as an inadequately profound way of living for a poet. Then, in The Ruined Cottage, which would be published in 1814 as a portion of The Excursion, which was itself intended to be one part of a masterwork, The Recluse, Wordsworth for the first time discovered his mature literary voice.
The Wordsworths relocated to Alfoxden House, close to the settlement of Nether Stowey, in 1797 in order to be nearer Coleridge. The local populace believed the Wordsworths and their guests were French spies due to the peculiar behaviors of the household, particularly their nightly walks across the countryside. As a result, a government agent was sent to monitor them. Wordsworth and Coleridge worked closely together from 1797 to 1800, which also marked the start of Wordsworth's mature poetic career. Wordsworth composed the verses that would be included in the Lyrical Ballads volumes published in 1798 and 1800. These poems include "Tintern Abbey," "Expostulation and Reply," "The Tables Turned," "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," and "Michael." Wordsworth also completed a piece in 1798.
Together with Coleridge, the Wordsworths departed for Germany in September 1798 and arrived back independently in May 1799 following some arguments. Wordsworth composed more poetry while he was in Germany, and upon his return to England, he started work on a revised collection of Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth published a lengthy preface in the 1800 second edition, outlining his motivations for writing the way he did and outlining a personal poetics that has remained influential and contentious to this day. The introduction was a goldmine of insight for Victorian readers like Matthew Arnold, who had a tendency to revere Wordsworth; nonetheless, Wordsworth's dependence on emotion severely alarmed modernist writers like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who, while they could accept the constraints on poetic diction,
Wordsworth's "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," which has undergone numerous revisions and expansions for subsequent editions, is an exposition of his ideas about poetry and poetic language that is at once polemical, pedantic, and problematic. It is not a systematic poetics. In every version of the introduction, the poet engages in a highly discursive process of "thinking aloud" in an effort to develop concepts about poetry by drawing on previously published poems. When reading the prelude, it's crucial to keep in mind that it logically and chronologically corresponds with the writing of the majority of the poetry. The two main points of the preface are that Wordsworth believed that poetry diction had grown far too artificial and that the poet's place in society had become too peripheral, and that correcting poetic diction is necessary. He
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet
The poem's final section reflects on nature's ability to triumph over the phony and surface-level "dreary intercourse of daily life" that Wordsworth connected with city life, particularly intellectual life in London. Wordsworth identified these factors with urban life in the preface, characterizing them as working against the elevation of thought in which the poet specializes:
Because a myriad of factors that were unknown in the past are now working together to weaken the mind's ability to distinguish between things and to fit it for any kind of intentional effort, ultimately bringing it to a near-savage condition of torpor. The most potent of these causes are the major national events that occur on a daily basis and the growing concentration of males in cities, where the monotony of their jobs creates a desire for spectacular happenings that are satisfied hourly by the quick dissemination of intelligence. The literature of the nation's theatrical displays has adapted to this inclination of life and manners. I had almost stated that the priceless works of our ancestors—Shakespear and Milton, for example—are neglected because
Wordsworth attributed the social ills of society to individuals rather than social institutions in a letter to Catherine Clarkson written years later on June 4, 1812: "As to public affairs; they are most alarming... The [Prince Regent] seems neither respected nor beloved; and the lower orders have been for upwards of thirty years accumulating in pestilential masses of ignorant population; the effects now begin to show themselves." Wordsworth's early identification with these "masses of population" makes these remarks noteworthy, but even in the preface, it is clear that he had started to portray "the lower orders" as essentially apart from the activities of the state and the arts. Given his proclaimed faith in "the people," this belief is astounding.
Wordsworth was undoubtedly aware that the poems in Lyrical Ballads were not like the traditional verse of the day even before the first edition was published in 1798. He also understood that snobbish critics would likely write them off for not being sufficiently sophisticated in tone and subject matter. They did, and Wordsworth responded to his detractors in large measure with the revisions he made to the preface of the 1802 edition. However, Wordsworth created a clear connection even in the 1800 version of the preface between a simple poetic diction and a correct relationship to nature and society; in other words, he makes the question of poetic diction moral, and his criticism of a sonnet by Thomas Gray serves as an ethical illustration.
William and Dorothy Wordsworth were residing at Dove Cottage at Town End, Grasmere, by December 1799. After Sir James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, passed away in May 1802, his heir, Sir William Lowther, promised to provide the Wordsworth children the full amount, notwithstanding the ongoing legal dispute regarding his debt to Wordsworth's father's estate. On October 2, 1802, Wordsworth wed Mary Hutchinson because of his financial prospects. In addition to providing for their expanding family, the Wordsworths were able to maintain their generosity towards several friends and writers who frequently spent months at a time staying at Dove Cottage thanks to the settlement. Additionally, the passing of the Earl of Lonsdale signaled the start of a tight political and economic partnership between
Over the following few years, Wordsworth wrote with more vigor and passion than ever before, and although he was still targeted by snide remarks by trendy critics like Francis Jeffrey, his standing and financial situation gradually improved. Perhaps his best-known lyrics, "The Solitary Reaper," "Resolution and Independence," and "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," were written during these years. Wordsworth paints a complete, yet ethically nuanced, portrait of the interaction between humans and the natural world in these poems. These poems, which draw inspiration from Neoplatonism, also set the stage for Wordsworth's eventual return to traditional religious beliefs. Wordsworth finished a significant overhaul of the "poem to Coleridge" in 1805, which would be published following the poet's passing in 1850 after going through several rounds of alterations and revisions. Many detractors think that the
Wordsworth moved to Allan Bank, a grander home in Grasmere, with his family in May 1808, having completed his "great decade." Dove Cottage was taken over by Thomas De Quincy. An extensive political tract about the British expedition to Portugal to fight against Napoleon's forces encamped on the Spanish peninsula, The Convention of Cintra (1809), provides evidence of a decisive shift in Wordsworth's social and political views during this period, and consequently, his poetical views as well. Wordsworth wrote, "In France royalty is no more," in his "Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff," dated 1793. He may have stated, "In William Wordsworth, Jacobinism is no more," in 1808. Wordsworth's early confidence in equality is replaced in The Convention of Cintra by a narrowly
It's plausible to say that Wordsworth's lyrical ability began to decline during The Convention of Cintra because he appeared to have given in to inflexible abstractions like justice, power, and patriotism. The Convention of Cintra is unquestionably a derivative of Edmund Burke, if "A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff" was a Godwin ripoff. When Thomas Quayle saw a copy of Wordsworth's pamphlet, Henry Crabb Robinson said that Wordsworth's writing style was similar to the worst aspects of Burke's. By 1793, the radical republican had absorbed not only Burke's style but also the core of his ideas. Wordsworth's clarity of language appears to have been lost in the process of transforming his ideas, as evidenced by "A Letter to
William Wordsworth wrote to his friend Robert Southey on Wednesday evening, December 2, 1812, informing him of the poet's six-year-old son Thomas Wordsworth's passing the day before. This letter's clarity and directness powerfully and honorably convey Wordsworth's grief:
My son Thomas started exhibiting symptoms of the measles last Thursday. He recovered well until Tuesday between the hours of 10 and 11, when he was especially relaxed and at ease. Suddenly, there was an inflammation in his lungs that was uncontrollable, and before six o'clock in the evening, the sweet Innocent gave his soul to God for no apparent reason. He didn't seem to suffer much physically, but I worry about something in his mind because he was old enough to have pondered a lot about dying, a topic that was constantly on his mind because of his sister's cemetery.
The second child of William and Mary Wordsworth to pass away while still a youngster was Thomas. A few months before her fourth birthday, in June of the previous year, Catherine had passed away.
Lord Lonsdale suggested in late 1812 that he give Wordsworth and his family a yearly allowance of 100 pounds until a paid post became available. Though initially hesitant, Wordsworth agreed to take up the patronage, and on January 8, 1813, he wrote to confirm receiving the money. A few months later, he was relieved to be offered the position of Stamp Distributor. In May 1813, the Wordsworths relocated to Rydal Mount, the poet's last residence, with the guarantee of financial stability. With Lonsdale's gift and patronage, the once extreme republican and admirer of French revolution and English democracy became closer to the aristocratic earl. Wordsworth had entirely changed in terms of politics; in terms of poetry,
Wordsworth's political literary compositions come to an end with Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland (1818), in addition to letters and other notes. Although one reviewer called these "nearly unreadable," they are essential to comprehending Wordsworth's involvement in both local and national politics. Wordsworth should not have participated in electioneering as the Distributor of Stamps, yet his two speeches unequivocally reaffirmed the local nobility. By this point, Wordsworth had come to feel that upholding the established social structures in English society was the only way to preserve the values extolled in "Michael" and other early works. Wordsworth, acting as the official Tory speaker, claimed that the Whigs had overestimated human nature, as had they and he at the
Wordsworth continued to pay special attention to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's volatile first son, Hartley, a minor poet and biographer who haunted the Lake District on "pot house wanderings," as Wordsworth memorably put it, even after the men had grown apart by the time of Coleridge's death in 1834. Wordsworth's "To H.C. Six Years Old" and Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" both refer to Hartley, the youngster who inspired the Immortality Ode. Hartley was a helpless character who was adored by the nearby farmers, and Wordsworth took a particular interest in ensuring his well-being. Just a few months before Wordsworth gave the order to bury his friend's kid in the Wordsworth plot at Grasmere Churchyard, Hartley passed away in 1849. Wordsworth stated, "He would have wished it."
Wordsworth had largely stopped writing poetry by the time he was chosen Poet Laureate of England in 1843. He reworked and reorganized his works, released different versions, and hosted friends and literary guests. He had been regarded as a wise man for a while when he passed away in 1850, with even his fiercest critics ignoring the radical beginnings of his poetry and politics.
