William Wordsworth

Background

Lake District

Romantic poetry

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was one of the first and most influential of England's 'Romantic' poets. It was not until the 1860s, that the term 'Romantic' came to be applied to English poetry written between 1798 and 1824. That poets today enjoy the freedom to express themselves with sincerity about any ordinary subject and in accessible, everyday, language owes much to the revolutionary approach to writing that Wordsworth encouraged.

Romanticism was a new way of considering man and his relationship with the environment. Romantic poets reacted against the prevailing Augustan poetry (popular from about 1650 to1750), which they found too monotonous and lacking in feeling.

Augustan poetry followed tight, traditional rules. It takes its name fom the classical poetry written during the time of Augustus Caesar in Ancient Rome, and its style and vocabulary was elaborate, artificial and contrived. Augustan poets considered that elevated diction, heroic couplets and complex figures of speech dignified their art. Wordsworth openly criticised 'the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers.' He argued that their 'lines appear manufactured, and lose all that character of enthusiasm and inspiration, without which they become cold and vapid, how sublime soever the ideas and the images may be which they express.'

Unsuitable, too, were Augustan poetry's artificial situations, artfully and unemotionally composed for high society readers. Wordsworth revitalised poetry with something much more imaginative, derived from emotion – 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' – that was 'recollected in tranquillity.' William Blake (1757–1827) maintained that he wrote from 'inspiration and vision.' John Keats (1795–1821), another Romantic poet, insisted: 'if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.' Wordsworth and other Romantic poets were intent on expressing intensely personal, inner feelings. A poet, declared Wordsworth, needed to possess and express 'more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness . . . than are supposed to be common among mankind.'

Contemporary verse portrayed people in a sophisticated, social environment. Any rural matter tended to be depicted as an idyllic pastoral existence, with ever-youthful and dancing shepherds and shepherdesses. Wordsworth revolutionised the subject matter of poetry by exploring apparently insignificant 'incidents and situations from common life,' expressed in the unaffected speech of unsophisticated country folk. Most of all, he explored individual personal experience: either his own or those of people who were not part of the society around them. Throughout his poetry we find frequent use of 'solitude', 'single', ''alone', 'I' and 'oneself.' The single figure who embodies the consoling spirit of a lonely landscape is well illustrated in such works as 'The Solitary Reaper', 'Lucy Gray', the 'Old Cumberland Beggar' and the 'Leech-Gatherer' in Resolution and Independence.

Wordsworth complained that poets, from Dryden (1631–1700) to Pope (1688–1744), had rarely described natural objects with any accurate observation. Traditional perception of the natural world was limited to the impressions of the senses and conveyed through pictorial description. Though landscape is prominent in Romantic poetry, the verse is never simply descriptive. Wordsworth saw the natural world as a stimulus for thinking about the emotional response it generated within him. It was man's growing awareness of an inner, religious response to nature that interested Wordsworth, (not simply the physical 'rocks, and stones. and trees').

Most of all, it was the 'Mind of Man' that Wordsworth declared was his 'haunt, and the main region of [his] song.' The mind, through imagination, could reach beyond sensory experience;it could experience 'absent things as if they were present' and perceive the infinite. For Wordsworth, the mind was 'creator and receiver both,/Working but in alliance with the works/Which it beholds.' His poetry was the product of a collaboration with nature within the mind, emotions and imagination. It is the landscape of Wordsworth's mind that we find in his poetry.

Wordsworth's childhood

Cockermouth in Cumberland, in north-west England, was the 'sweet birthplace' of William Wordsworth (1770). The area is one of outstanding natural beauty, popularly known as the Lake District (see Links). With his sister, Dorothy, and three brothers, the young William enjoyed playing and bathing in the River Derwent which flowed past his back garden. Loving the peaceful, panoramic background of beautiful mountains, such as 'distant Skiddaw's lofty height', he grew up nourished by 'the calm that Nature breathes.'

The death of Wordsworth's mother (1875) made it difficult for his father to manage the young family. William and his brothers were sent to board at Hawkshead village and attend the local grammar school.

Hawkshead Grammar School

Hawkshead's headmaster encouraged Wordsworth's obvious interest in poetry, lending him anthologies of eighteenth-century poetry. Encouraged to try his own hand at writing verse, Wordsworth attempted a piece about a favourite seat under an ancient yew tree at Esthwaite: 'Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree', (published later as his first poem of Lyrical Ballads).

Hawkshead nestles among glorious lakeland scenery, close to the lake of Esthwaite Water. Before and after school, young William delighted in 'running wild among the mountains and the winds', clinging fearfully to the Yewdale Crags, fishing, skating, gathering hazels in the Graythwaite woods or spending 'half the night among the cliffs.' In the company of Hawkshead schoolfriends, he was exhilarated by boat races on the lakes and joyful horse riding excursions to the enchanted ruins of Furness Abbey.

Furness Abbey

As well as his sheer physical delight in the natural environment, Wordsworth grew to appreciate that within nature and within himself, there was a vital interrelationship: 'spots of time', when he was 'foster'd alike by beauty and by fear.'

One famous, fearful experience concerned the young Wordsworth's boating theft on Ullswater lake. Though initially proud of his rowing skill, his guilty conscience suddenly personified the pursuing reflection of a huge cliff. He sensed that the mountain was a retributive 'living thing.' Recollection of the experience during the following days deepened his intuitive realisation of 'a dim and undetermin'd sense/Of unknown modes of being' within nature.

Boating

University and France

In 1787, Wordsworth entered St John's College, Cambridge. He found academic study uninteresting and spent much of his time either reading for pleasure or rambling in the French and Swiss Alps (1790) and Wales (1791).

As well as admiring the spectacular scenery of the Alps during his visit to France, Wordsworth was excited by the idealistic principles of the French Revolution: 'twas a time when Europe was rejoiced,/France standing on the top of golden hours,/And human nature seeming born again.' When he returned to France in 1792, Wordsworth became more involved, emotionally and politically, with the ordinary citizens' great struggle for individual liberty. The increasingly violent course of events in France and its war with Britain, however, were to leave Wordsworth disillusioned: 'Frenchmen had changed a war of self defence/For one of Conquest, losing sight of all/Which they had struggled for.'

Back in England and away from revolutionary politics, Wordsworth realised that his 'heart had been turned aside from Nature's way.' He published two long, conventionally descriptive poems: 'An Evening Walk' (about the Lake District) and 'Descriptive Sketches' (of the Alps). Wordsworth used the stylised idiom and diction of eighteenth-century writing, and offered only simple pictorial descriptions in this imitative writing. Little notice was taken of his work. He had yet to develop his own poetic theory and practice.

'Three persons and one soul'

Reunited with his beloved sister Dorothy, they rented property in Dorset and then in Somerset. Dorothy's acute observation of, and delight in, the natural world stirred William's memories of their childhood and his own love of nature. 'She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,' he acknowledged.

A second major influence on Wordsworth soon appeared. The great contemporary poet and philosopher, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834, lived close by and frequently visited the Wordsworths. The happy trio enjoyed long walking tours, discussing the theory and practice of poetry. Coleridge described their harmony as 'three persons and one soul'. They discussed how human thought, emotion and personal morality were influenced by experiences of the natural environment. For Wordsworth, the people who were closest to nature were those who lived in the countryside. Such 'humble and rustic' folk had been completely ignored by poets before Wordsworth.

'Lyrical Ballads'

Coleridge and Wordsworth courageously proposed to revolutionise English poetry by jointly publishing poetry, using a simplicity of style and language. While Coleridge presented poetry with a supernatural setting (The Rime of The Ancient Mariner), Wordsworth contributed poems about 'the things of every day', and 'the loveliness and the wonder of the world before us.'

Wordsworth's Preface (see Links) to the Lyrical Ballads was an extraordinary and revolutionary manifesto to justify this new kind of poetry. Ballads and lyrics had been long regarded as distinct genre. Wordsworth combined the ballad's narrative form with the lyric's emotional content, placing his emphasis on the latter. Poetry, he argued, should explore human feeling and emotions – 'the essential passions of the heart'. He viewed the poet's role as a 'man among men, speaking to men', employing a 'selection of language really spoken by men', and using 'incidents of common life' to reveal 'the primary laws of our nature.'

Reflecting on experiences of physical and human, nature led Wordsworth to greater spiritual awareness of 'the life of things' and of his own inner self:

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

'Tintern Abbey'

He perceived that the spirit within nature had actively led him and shaped his own consciousness and moral character, as:

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

Fashionable literary critics (wedded to the old Augustan tradition of Dryden, Pope and Dr. Johnson) were hostile to this strange kind of nature poetry, with its simple country folk and plain language. Wordsworth insisted, 'It is the honourable characteristic of poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of critics, but in those of poets themselves.' None the less, the critics contemptuously dismissed Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, all associated with the Lake District, with the negative epithet – 'Lake Poets'.

Lake District

'The Prelude'

At Coleridge's invitation, Wordsworth and Dorothy spent the 1798–9 winter in Germany. The weather was abnormally severe and the Wordsworths soon felt homesick. In nostalgic mood, Wordsworth settled to writing a semi-autobiographical poem – The Prelude – reflecting on experiences of his lakeland boyhood days that had significantly shaped his creative development as a poet. Among recollections of his earliest memories of communicating with the natural world was his 'baptism' in Cockermouth's River Derwent. He intended that this should serve as an introduction to a more ambitious epic poem, to be entitled The Recluse, exploring perspectives on nature, human nature, moral and psychological development.

The adult child

Wordsworth recognised that there was much that he could learn from the child he had once been. It was his belief that a man only reaches truly mature understanding when he develops recollections of his childhood's intuitive perception of nature and reality. That a man could be taught wisdom by the child that he once was revealed, paradoxically, that 'the child is father of the man.'

Daily journeys to school between Cockermouth and Hawkshead had taken Wordsworth through the picturesque village of Grasmere. Here, one day, he had decided 'Must be his Home, this Valley be his World.' In late 1799, William and Dorothy rented a cottage in Grasmere (now called Dove Cottage). For Wordsworth, this 'hallowed spot' (lovingly described in 'A Farewell') was 'the loveliest spot that man hath ever found.' Determined to settle down in this 'paradise', brother and sister soon created a 'happy garden' and orchard behind Dove Cottage, where Wordsworth wrote many of his greatest poems.

Dove Cottage, Grasmere

By 1805, Wordsworth had completed the fourteen books of his great masterpiece, The Prelude, reflecting on the formative experiences of his poetic development. Mary Hutchinson, whom Wordsworth married in 1802, accurately labelled the manuscript as the 'Growth of a Poet's Mind'.

Emotion recollected in tranquillity

Among many of Wordsworth's great short poems of this period is 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud', popularly known as 'The Daffodils'. Wandering aimlessly, uninvolved with his environment – as 'lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales and hills' – the poet encountered a visually delightful spectacle: thousands of daffodils cloaking the lake shore of Ullswater, between Stybarrow Crag and Glencoyne Beck.

At a later time, the poet's imaginative recollection enabled him to re-experience this emotional 'spot of time' and 'see into the life of things.' It was this emotion that a poem could arouse, rather than the verse itself, which Wordsworth valued. His 'inward eye' perceived a magnificent order and harmony within nature. The unity of the scene embraced not only the dancing flowers and the waves dancing 'beside them', but also the poet who 'gazed and gazed'; such insightful solitude placed the poet in a state of 'bliss'.

Ullswater

However, in the sonnet 'The World Is Too Much With Us', Wordsworth expressed his concern over people's preoccupation with materialism. The Industrial Revolution had led to the growth of great industrial towns and cities. Factory employment was encouraging a drift of England's rural population to sprawling urban areas. Wordsworth felt that life in town slums distorted people's individuality and robbed them of the vital, renewing powers of nature. We are 'out of tune' with our own human nature, he insisted, when we lose that original and emotional, personal rapport with nature.

Arguably, a profound change in Wordsworth's attitude to nature appeared in Resolution and Independence (1802). The poet recognised the Leech-gatherer's uncomplaining, dignified endurance of a particularly hard life. The old man's strong resolution and independent spirit revealed a 'human strength' that had to fight against nature to survive. However, independence from nature and the poet's appeal to God to 'be [his] help and stay secure' heralded a new direction in Wordsworth's thinking.

Wordsworth's visionary ability to see 'into the life of things' in nature deserted him as he grew older. His ode, Intimations of Immortality (1806) – one of the most famous poems in English literature – contains the pessimistic confession, 'The things which I have seen I now can see no more.'

Later life

Wordsworth

During the latter half of his long life, Wordsworth's poetry and attitudes (political, religious and philosophical) became depressingly conservative and conventional. His writing lacked inspiration and was, mostly, mechanical. An exception was an inspired series of sonnets about the River Duddon, written between 1806 and 1820. The poem considers the separate stages of the river's life, from birth to death. River and poet progress through their own lives towards similar destinations; but while the river 'shall for ever glide,' man 'must vanish.' Nevertheless, the poet is brought to the realisation that it will be 'Enough, if something from our hands have power/To live, and act, and serve the future hour,' – as, indeed, does his verse.

Lake District

Lack of space in Dove Cottage for his growing family and many visitors forced Wordsworth to move to larger accommodation in Grasmere, first to Allan Bank and then to Grasmere Rectory. Then tragedy struck. Two of his young children died; John, his favourite brother, was drowned at sea; and Dorothy suffered from senility for the final twenty years of her life. Problems in his personal life caused Coleridge (who had settled in the nearby town of Keswick) to quarrel with Wordsworth and their estrangement served as another bitter blow for Wordsworth.

Rydal Mount, Grasmere

Of economic necessity, Wordsworth sought and secured a position as Distributor of Stamps (local tax official) for the region, prompting Browning's famous jibe: 'Just for a handful of silver he left us.' Finally, the family could afford better accommodation and they moved to Rydal Mount, two miles south of Grasmere.

Wordsworth continued to embark on various walking tours – the Alps, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland – and still wrote, but there was little of any real merit. Though a section of The Recluse was published in 1814 (entitled 'The Excursion'), the project was never completed. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1843. A revised version of his yet-unpublished 1805 manuscript, The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet's Mind, and an 800-line fragment of Home At Grasmere, were finally published following Wordsworth's death in 1850.