William Wordsworth

Chapter 2 Wordsworth

William Wordsworth, the representative poet of the early romanticism, was born in 1770, in a lawyer's family at Cockermouth, Cumberland. His mother died when he was only eight. His father followed her six years later. The orphan was taken in charge by relatives, who sent him to school at Hawkshead in the beautiful lake district in Northwestern England. Here, the unroofed school of nature attracted him more than the classroom, and he learned more eagerly from flowers and hills and stars than from his books. So the child early cherished a love of nature, which he later expressed in his poetry.

He studied at Cambridge from 1787 to 1791. While at university, he associated with those young Republicans whose political enthusiasm had been roused by the French Revolution. In the years 1790-1792 he twice visited France. On his second visit he became acquainted with Beaupuy, an army officer of the new-born Republic of France, who kindled the heart of the young Englishman with a spirit of revolt against all social iniquities and a sympathy for the poor, humble folk. Wordsworth joined the Gerondists, i.e. the moderate Republicans. But he was forced to return to England because his relatives cut off his allowance.

In 1795, Wordsworth settled, with his sister Dorothy, at Racedown in Somersetshire. They lived a frugal life and Dorothy, as his confidante and inspirer, made him turn his eyes to "the face of nature" and take an interest in the peasants living in their neighbourhood. She also induced him to transform his observation of the landscape into the revelation of the beauty of nature in poetry, and thus "preserved the poet in him." Wordsworth wrote of her:

"She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;

And humble cares, and delicate fears;

A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;

And love, and thought, and joy."

In 1797 he made friends with Coleridge. Then they lived together in the Quantock Hills, Somerset, devoting their time to writing of poetry. In their partnership, Coleridge was to take up the "supernatural, or at least romantic" subjects, while Wordsworth was "to give the charm of novelty to things of every day." In 1798 they jointly published the "Lyrical Ballads". Coleridge's contribution was his masterpiece "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The majority of poems in this collection, however, were written by Wordsworth.

The publication of the "Lyrical Ballads" marked the break with the conventional poetical tradition of the 18th century, i.e., with classicism, and the beginning of the Romantic revival in England.

In the Preface to the "Lyrical Ballads", Wordsworth set forth his principles of poetry. As contrasted with the classicists who made reason, order and the old, classical traditions the criteria in their poetical creations, Wordsworth based his own poetical principle on the premise that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling." He appealed directly to individual sensations, i.e., pleasure,

excitement and enjoyment, as the foundation in the creation and appreciation of poetry. Poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." A poet's emotion extends from human affairs to nature, but emotion immediately expressed is as raw as wine newly bottled. Tranquil contemplation of an emotional experience matures the feeling and sensation, and makes possible the creation of good poetry like the refining of old wine. The function of poetry lies in its power to give an unexpected splendour to familiar and commonplace things, to incidents and situations from common life just as a prism can give a ray of commonplace sunlight the manifold miracle of colour. Ordinary peasants, children, even outcasts, all may be used as subjects in poetical creation. As to the language used in poetry, Wordsworth "endeavoured to bring (his) language near to the real language of men", "by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men" to a state of vivid sensation. These principles helped to crumble the theoretical foundations of the classical school of English poetry and to inspire a new generation of poets. The Preface to the "Lyrical Ballads" served as the manifesto of the English Romantic Movement in poetry.

With the establishment of the Jacobin dictatorship (May 1793-July 1794) and the rise of Napoleon (November 1799-April 1814) in France, Wordsworth's attitude towards the revolution changed and he gave up his former political enthusiasm. He retired to the northern lake district, first living at Grasmere and then at Rydal Mount. Here he lived in seclusion for a full half century. He became a Tory and upheld the reactionary policy of the British government. Then he accepted the office of a distributor of stamps and was made poet laureate. He was eighty when he died in 1850.

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey have often been mentioned as the "Lake Poets" because they lived in the Lake District in the northwestern part of England. The three traversed the same path in politics and in poetry, beginning as radicals and closing as conservatives.

Wordsworth lived a long life and wrote a lot of poems. He was at his best in descriptions of mountains and rivers, flowers and birds, children and peasants, and reminiscences of his own childhood and youth. As a great poet of nature, he was the first to find words for the most elementary sensations of man face to face with natural phenomena. These sensations are universal and old but, once expressed in his poetry, become charmingly beautiful and new. His deep love for nature runs through such short lyrics as "Lines Written in Early Spring", "To the Cuckoo", "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", "My Heart Leaps Up", "Intimations of Immortality" and "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey". The last is called his "lyrical hymn of thanks to nature":

"For nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,

And their glad animal movements all gone by)

To me was all in all. — I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite: a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye".

His poems of nature were written according to his own argument that "our continued influxes of feeling are directed and modified by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings." He stored up natural impressions and "thought long and deeply" over them before reproducing them in poetry. And then—

"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, sensation sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration: —feelings, too,

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered acts

Of kindness and of love." (Ibid)

Wordsworth's way of writing poetry is summed up by George Brandes thus: "He collects a winter store of bright summer moments."

Wordsworth was also a masterhand in searching and revealing the feelings of the common people. The themes of many of his poems were drawn from rural life and his characters belong to the lower classes in the English countryside. This is so because he was intimately acquainted with rural life and believed that in rural conditions man's elementary feelings find a better soil than in town life and can be better cultivated and strengthened in constant association with nature. Deep-rooted in his native soil, Wordsworth succeeded in drawing pathetic pictures of the labouring people ("The Solitary Reaper"), in depicting the naivety of simple peasant children ("We Are Seven") and in delineating with deep sympathy the sufferings of the poor, humble peasants ("Michael", "The Ruined Cottage", "Simon Lee", and "The Old Cumberland Beggar"). His "Lucy" poems are a series of short pathetic lyrics on the theme of harmony between humanity and nature:

"She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love.

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

— Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!"

A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees."

Wordsworth's poetry is distinguished by the simplicity and purity of his language. It was his theory that the language spoken by the peasants was, when purified from its defects, the best of all, "because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and emotions in simple and unelaborated expressions. "His theory and practice in poetical creation started from a dissatisfaction with the social reality under capitalism, and hinted at the thought of "back to nature" and "back to the patriarchal system of the old time".

"The Prelude" is Wordsworth's autobiographical poem, in 14 books, which was written in 1799-1805 but not published until 1850. It is the spiritual record of the poet's mind, honestly recording his own intimate mental experiences which cover his childhood, school days, years at Cambridge, his first impressions of London, his first visit to France, his residence in France during the Revolution, and his reaction to these various experiences, showing the development of his own thought and sentiment.

Many a critic has pointed out that nearly all Wordsworth's good poetry was written during the first decade of his literary career (1798-1807), when he still kept his early, political enthusiasm or at least retained some contact with the real life of his time. After that, his poetical talent obviously declined with his living in total seclusion and his turning more and more conservative in thought. His later writings were full of

mysticism and many of them unreadable. Wordsworth's "decline and fall" has become a frequent topic of criticism. Shelley wrote thus:

"In honoured poverty thy voice did weave

Songs consecrate to truth and liberty—

Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,

Thus having been, that thou shouldest cease to be."