WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

William Wordsworth  was born in 1770 in the Lake District. In 1791 he graduated from St John’s College, Cambridge. He left England in the same year for a walking tour of France, the Alps and Italy. It was during this period that, enthusiastic about new ideas of democracy, he became a supporter  of the French Revolution.

In 1791, Wordsworth visited France, which was engaged in the Revolutionary war with Britain at that time. During his stay there, he fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, and the next year in 1792, their daughter Caroline was born. Due to the ongoing war between the two countries he returned alone to England the next year. There are strong suggestions that he  did not marry Annette, though he continued to support both child and mother in the best possibly way for the rest of his life.

After returning to England, Wordsworth  published two long “travel diaries”,  An Evening Walk and  Descriptive Sketches in 1793.  A walking  tour that year took the poet across the Salisbury Plain and to Tintern Abbey (East Wales), both subjects of later poems. In 1795, in London, he met  the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, thus beginning one of the great friendships of literary history. The two poets had similar ideas on both love and poetry and enjoyed taking long walks together.                                                                                                                                           

By this time Wordsworth  had become intensely disillusioned with the Revolution whose initial ideals had degenerated into the so-called “Terror” (the years of Robespierre’s dictatorship when traitors to the new French Republic were executed by guillotine).  Politically he turned very conservative.  In 1798 Wordsworth  and Coleridge published anonymously Lyrical Ballads. The year after Wordsworth  and his sister Dorothy settled at Dove Cottage in the Lake District.  Later  he married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, and they had five children together. 

In 1800 the second edition of Lyrical Ballads included Wordsworth’s  famous prose Preface  detailing his  poetical principles. 

Wordsworth and Coleridge set out to overturn what they considered the priggish, learned and highly sculpted forms of 18th century English poetry and bring poetry within the reach of the average person by using normal, everyday language. They placed an emphasis on the vitality of the living voice used by  the poor to express their reality. Using this language also helped them  assert the universality of human emotions.

In the Preface Wordsworth wrote on the need for "common speech" within poems and argued against the hierarchy of the period which valued epic poetry above the lyric. 

In 1807, his Poems in Two Volumes were published, including Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood  which expressed his belief in the pre-existence of the soul.  Up to this point Wordsworth was known publicly only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this collection would cement his reputation. Its reception was unenthusiastic, however.

In 1810  Wordsworth's estrangement from Coleridge over the latter's opium addiction deprived him of a powerful incentive to imaginative and intellectual alertness. Wordsworth's appointment to a government position in 1813 relieved him of financial care.

Wordsworth's love for nature made him view the emergent  industrial society with unconcealed reserve. He opposed the Reform Bill of 1832, which, in his view, merely transferred political power from the land owners to the manufacturing class, but he never stopped pleading in favor of the victims of the factory system.

In 1843 Wordsworth was appointed Poet Laureate (official poet of a country). He died on 23 April 1850,  leaving his wife Mary to publish The Prelude three months later.

Wordsworth's most famous work, The Prelude, is considered by many to be the crowning achievement of English Romanticism. The poem, revised and expanded numerous times, chronicles the spiritual life of the poet and marks the birth of a new genre of poetry. Although Wordsworth worked on The Prelude throughout his life, the poem was  posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge".

The Prelude can claim to be the only true romantic epic  because it deals in narrative terms with the spiritual growth of the only true romantic hero, the poet. Wordsworth shared the general romantic notion that personal experience is the only way to gain living knowledge. The purpose of  The Prelude  was to recapture and interpret, with detailed precision, the whole range of experiences that had contributed to the shaping of his own mind.

Though it  failed to arouse great interest in 1850, it has since come to be recognised as his masterpiece.

Here you can download a mind map to revise William Wordsworth's  poetry. 

Now listen to his famous poem Daffodils.