Wordsworth, William

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WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM (1770–1850), British Romantic poet.

William Wordsworth is so synonymous with "Romanticism" that the period used to be called "The Age of Wordsworth." Born 7 April 1770, Wordsworth lived into the middle of the next century, when Victoria (r. 1837–1901) was Queen and Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) and Robert Browning (1812–1889) the celebrated new poets. It is often said that Wordsworth "the poet" died in 1807, survived by stodgy didactic work, minor new verse, repackaged older work, and a belated Poet Laureateship in 1843, yet his influence was considerable. Amid the encroachments of modern life, Wordsworth provided an enduring image of the poet as disciple of "Nature" and representative voice of feeling, whether of quiet sentiment, troubled passion, or moral severity. No less in life than in verse, he embodied "plain living and high thinking," at home in the Lake District in Northwest England, a region marked by natural beauty that he made famous. He was happy in his family life, yet often withdrew into meditation and depths of emotion.

Born in the Lake District, Wordsworth was one of five children. His father was a steward for a powerful local landlord, and the poet's boyhood was enjoyed in the market town of Cockermouth, with adventures in the nearby outdoors. The death of his mother when he was eight changed everything: his father, frequently away on business, sent William's sister Dorothy off to relatives and the brothers to school in distant Hawkshead. Five years later, his father died, and legal wrangling prevented the estate from being settled until 1802. In 1787 Wordsworth entered St John's College, Cambridge, to prepare for a living in the Church but Cambridge seemed an alien world to this native of the Lakelands. Vacationing in Europe in the summer of 1790, one year after the French Revolution, he caught the enchantment of millenarian hopes. He took his degree in 1791; that summer he toured Wales (climbing Mount Snow-don) and then returned to France in November 1791. Wordsworth was at once excited and troubled by the new politics of France. He found love with Annette Vallon, who bore their daughter, Caroline, in December 1792. But by then, depleted funds and a looming Terror had forced Wordsworth home, and, because of the ensuing war between England and France, it was not until 1802 (the Peace of Amiens) that he would see Annette and Caroline, just once more, prior to marrying a childhood sweetheart, Mary Hutchinson.

Across the turmoil of the 1790s Wordsworth grew "Sick, wearied out with contrarieties," and relinquished "moral questions in despair" (Prelude 10.900–01). The record of Wordsworth's activities from 1792 to 1795 is obscure. He may have become involved with radical politics at home and may have ventured to France. In 1795 a legacy of £900 enabled him to devote himself to poetry and reunite with his sister Dorothy (1771–1855), who was always to be his encourager, companion, scribe, and housekeeper. A new friend, the poet and journalist Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), inspired Wordsworth with a fresh sense of mission and power. In 1797, he and Dorothy moved to Somerset to be near Coleridge, and the poets were soon collaborating on Lyrical Ballads. Regarded today as a landmark of Romanticism, this volume was published anonymously in 1798 to mixed reviews. When local political anxieties put the group under suspicion, the Wordsworths' lease was not renewed, and the trio decided to go to Germany for winter, to soak up the language, culture, and philosophy.

With more financial resources, Coleridge enjoyed the university towns, while the Wordsworths spent a miserable winter in the remote village of Goslar. It was here that Wordsworth drafted new poems for Lyrical Ballads and his first fragments of autobiography. Coleridge was urging him to write a major philosophical epic, and could abide the auto-biographical turn only as preparatory, but for Wordsworth "the story of my life" (1.668) would become compelling epic in its own right. Returning to the Lake District in late 1799, the Wordsworths settled in Grasmere, their home for the rest of their lives. In 1800 a two-volume Lyrical Ballads, now signed as Wordsworth's, appeared with a controversial Preface declaring such principles as inspiration from "emotion recollected in tranquillity," the equation of "all good poetry" with "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," and the tuning of poetic language to ordinary conversation, rooted in "nature" and "rural society." This manifesto was in part an exercise in mythmaking; but it also marked, said the critic William Hazlitt (1778–1830) in retrospect, "a new style and a new spirit." It set the terms of Wordsworth's fame, even as it focused the charges of his critics for decades on.

The steadily expanding household finally settled at Rydal Mount in 1813, when Wordsworth received a patronage position from the Tory government. The decade prior had been pained by several losses: his brother John, a sea captain, perished in a shipwreck in 1805; two of his and Mary's five children died in 1812; and by 1810 Coleridge's opium addiction and truancy from his own family led to strains in his relationship with Wordsworth. This resulted in a bitter alienation that was not mended until the late 1820s. Leading reviewers ridiculed Poems in Two Volumes (1807), and would be no kinder to The Excursion (1814), a nine-book epic "On Man, On Nature, and On Human Life." Yet the attention, and the advent of a collected Poems (in which the poems were arranged by conceptual category rather than by date) in 1815, confirmed Wordsworth's fame and importance, and he continued to write and publish in every decade of his long life.

During this life, The Excursion was regarded as his major work. The story of a ruined cottage in its first book was widely admired, and overall Wordsworth was prized for poems filled with pathos, such as "Michael" and "The Brothers" (in which, as he said in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, the feeling gives importance to the action and situation); odes of crisis and troubled consolation, such as "Tintern Abbey" and "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"; and a wealth of exquisite sonnets, songs, and lyrics ("The Solitary Reaper" was among the most famous). Victorians revered the poet whose love of "Nature" could heal their "iron age," whose images of childhood and youth evoked simple joys, whose mature poetry gave unembarrassed voice to feeling. The poet John Keats (1795–1821) preferred the "dark passages" and "the burden of the mystery"—the poetry also of most interest to twentieth-century readers, for whom The Prelude (that preparatory autobiography) is the recognized major work. Just weeks after Wordsworth's death, this fourteen-book epic, composed across fifty years, appeared in print. Prelude it was: another version completed in 1805 was published in 1926, and then, further into the twentieth century, a two-book version from 1798–1799, and a five-book version from 1804. In this array of narrative forms and ceaseless revisions, of multiple selves, of writing reflexively as a poet about becoming a poet, The Prelude seems a venture of prescient modernism, but it also endures as a vivid imaginative reckoning with a life animated by the contradictory currents of its age.

bibliography

Primary Sources

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, revised by Helen Darbishire. Oxford, U.K., 1949–1959.

Wordsworth, William. Poems. Edited by John O. Hayden. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1977.

——. The Prelude, 1798, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception; Recent critical essays. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York, 1979.

——. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Oxford, U.K., 1974.

Wordsworth, William, and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. Edited and arranged by Ernest de Selincourt and revised by Chester L. Shaver, Mary Moorman, and Alan G. Hill. Oxford, U.K., 1967–1993.