Transcript Slide 1

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
(1770-1850)
William Wordsworth Timeline
William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in a
fine Georgian house in Cockermouth, now called
Wordsworth House. His father John was estate
agent to Sir James Lowther, who owned the house.
The garden at the back, with the River Derwent
flowing past, was a place of magic and adventure
for the young William. William has an elder
brother Richard, a younger sister Dorothy and two
younger brothers John and Christopher.
1778
Wordsworth's mother Ann Cookson Wordsworth dies.
William goes to Hawkshead Grammar School.
1783
Father dies.
Responsibility for William and his brothers passed to his
mother’s brother, Christopher Cookson, an unhappy
arrangement for the children, who found their guardian
unsympathetic.
From 1779 until 1787 William attended the
Grammar School in Hawkshead, lodging with
Ann Tyson initially, then with his brothers. At
Hawkshead William thrived - receiving
encouragement from the headmaster to read
and write poetry. During these years he made
many visits to the countryside, gaining
inspiration as the powers of nature exercised
their influence.
1787
Begins University
Wordsworth enrolls as a member of St. John's
College at Cambridge University. He publishes his
first piece of writing, a sonnet in The European
Magazine.
1789 An Evening Walk.
The young Lady to whom this was addressed was
my Sister. It was composed at school, and during
my two first College vacations. There is not an
image in it which I have not observed.
1790
Walking tour of France, Switzerland,
and Germany
1791
Graduates from University. Wordsworth receives his
bachelor's degree from Cambridge University.
In November, he travels to France and is fascinated by
the Republican movement. He was befriended by
Michel Beaupuy, through whom he came to share the
ideals of the French Revolution. Whilst in Orléans he
had an affair with Annette Vallon, who bore him a
child.
December 1792
Leaves France before his first daughter is
born.
Wordsworth runs out of money and is forced
to leave France, leaving behind a pregnant
Annette Vallon. Vallon later gives birth to the
couple's daughter Caroline.
1793
Returns to England to earn money; AngloFrench War prevents his return to France
until 1802.
In England, he began to give wholehearted
support to the radical philosophy of Thomas
Paine and William Godwin, openly
expressing their ideas in his own poetry.
1793
Begins publishing
Wordsworth publishes his first poetry
collections, Descriptive Sketches and An
Evening Walk.
1794 Descriptive Sketches.
Much the greatest part of this poem was
composed during my walks upon the banks of
the Loire in the years 1791, 1792. I will only
notice that the description of the valley filled
with mist, beginning--"In solemn shapes," was
taken from that beautiful region of which the
principal features are Lungarn and Sarnen.
Nothing that I ever saw in nature left a more
delightful impression on my mind than that
which I have attempted, alas! how feebly, to
convey to others in these lines.
1795
Moves to Dorset
Wordsworth receives a small inheritance from a
friend and sets up house in Dorset, England with his
sister Dorothy. He meets fellow poet Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, and the two become close friends.
1797
Friendship with Coleridge.
Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy move closer to
Coleridge. For a year, the two poets are in daily
contact with one another, a period that proves to
be a vital creative period for both of them.
Wordsworth produces the poem "Tintern Abbey,"
and Coleridge writes "The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner." They collaborate on a groundbreaking
collection of poetry.
In March 1798,Wordsworth’s first spring
at Alfoxden House in a captivating rural
setting overlooking the Bristol Channel,
we clearly discern THEMES AND
TECHNIQUES evolving toward what is
now thought of as quintessentially
Wordsworthian.
Such accounts are sharply observed
pictures of the natural world, expressed in
everyday language. Many of these lyrics
record the growth of the speaker’s
perceptions as he creates and meditates
upon his view of the world.
VISION AND SIGHT
Throughout his poems, Wordsworth fixates on vision
and sight as the vehicles through which individuals are
transformed. As speakers move through the world,
they see visions of great natural loveliness, which they
capture in their memories. Later, in moments of
darkness, the speakers recollect these visions, as in “I
wandered lonely as a cloud.” Here, the speaker
daydreams of former jaunts through nature, which
“flash upon that inward eye / which is the bliss of
solitude” (21–22). The power of sight captured by our
mind’s eye enables us to find comfort even in our
darkest, loneliest moments.
Elsewhere, Wordsworth describes the connection
between seeing and experiencing emotion, as in
“My heart leaps up” (1807), in which the speaker
feels joy as a result of spying a rainbow across the
sky. Detailed images of natural beauty abound in
Wordsworth’s poems, including descriptions of
daffodils and clouds, which focus on what can be
seen, rather than touched, heard, or felt. In Book
Fourteenth of The Prelude, climbing to the top of
a mountain in Wales allows the speaker to have a
prophetic vision of the workings of the mind as it
thinks, reasons, and feels.
It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before,
The red-breast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.
One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason;
Our minds shall drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.
And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above;
We’ll frame the measure of our souls,
They shall be tuned to love.
Equally characteristic of Wordsworth is that
‘pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the
mind’.
The joy of the Alfoxden spring takes place
amidst the poverty and anguish of
neighboring common men and women.
The landscape of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads
poems is peopled not only by joyful poets of
creative natural perceptions but by mad
mothers, idiot boys, starving and freezing old
women, terrified and despairing convicts,
shepherds reduced to public relief, American
Indian women abandoned to die.
In the best of these poems, Wordsworth
merges his humanitarian concerns with an
interest in the psychology not only of the
victim but also of the poet-narrator who,
interacting with the sufferer, tells the tale.
1798
Lyrical Ballads published.
Wordsworth and Coleridge publish Lyrical
Ballads, a collection of poems written in
"language really used by men," free of the
"gaudiness and inane phraseology of many
modern writers.“ The book sparks the
Romantic Age of English literature.
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 writing the verses using
normal, everyday language. They place an
emphasis on the vitality of the living voice that
the poor use to express their reality.
Using this language also helps assert the
universality of human emotions. Even the title
of the collection recalls rustic forms of art the word "lyrical" links the poems with the
ancient rustic bards and lends an air of
spontaneity, while "ballads" are an oral mode
of storytelling used by the common people.
In the 'Advertisement' included in the 1798
edition, Wordsworth explained his poetical
concept:
“The majority of the following poems are to
be considered as experiments. They were
written chiefly with a view to ascertain how
far the language of conversation in the middle
and lower classes of society is adapted to the
purpose of poetic pleasure.”
If the experiment with vernacular language
was not enough of a departure from the
norm, the focus on simple, uneducated
country people as the subject of poetry was a
signal shift to modern literature. One of the
main themes of "Lyrical Ballads" is the return
to the original state of nature, in which
people led a purer and more innocent
existence.
Wordsworth subscribed to Rousseau's belief
that humanity was essentially good but was
corrupted by the influence of society. This
may be linked with the sentiments
spreading through Europe just prior to the
French Revolution.
Though all of William Wordsworth verses
showcase his love for nature, Daffodils, a 24 line
poesy, stand out among the rest, and is one of
the most sought after poems chosen even for
academic curriculums. The poem, talks of the
poet’s sighting of a host of daffodils beside a lake.
The poet has beautifully portrayed his
imagination on the spotting of the dancing
daffodils, which are more than a ten thousand,
and takes the reader to a stride.
While the poet ends the poem with the
note, “And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils”, you will find
yourself being floated away like how
William started the poem, and that the
jocundity it brings along is inexpressible.
The Daffodils opens with the speaker
remote from the natural world, as is a
cloud that soars distantly above that world.
Abruptly, a ‘laughing company’ of daffodils
surrounds him. The sparkling waves of
Ullswater, the daffodils ‘dancing in the
breeze’, the surrounding trees, and even
that floating cloud all fuse in a vision of
unity that encompasses the poet himself.
But the ultimate importance of that
visionary moment becomes apparent to
him only years later:
For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure feels,
And dances with the Daffodils.
MEMORY
Memory allows Wordsworth’s speakers to
overcome the harshness of the contemporary
world. Recollecting their childhoods gives
adults a chance to reconnect with the visionary
power and intense relationship they had with
nature as children. In turn, these memories
encourage adults to re-cultivate as close a
relationship with nature as possible as an
antidote to sadness, loneliness, and despair.
The act of remembering also allows the
poet to write: Wordsworth argued in the
1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads that
poetry
sprang
from
the
calm
remembrance of passionate emotional
experiences.
Poems cannot be composed at the moment
when emotion is first experienced. Instead, the
initial emotion must be combined with other
thoughts and feelings from the poet’s past
experiences using memory and imagination. The
poem produced by this time-consuming process
will allow the poet to convey the essence of his
emotional memory to his readers and will permit
the readers to remember similar emotional
experiences of their own.
The first edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared
in an edition of five hundred copies, with
nineteen poems written by Wordsworth and
four – including Rime of the Ancient Mariner
– by Coleridge.
Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817)
recalled that he was to write on ‘persons and
characters supernatural’, while Wordsworth
would concentrate on subjects from
‘ordinary life’, giving ‘the charm of novelty to
things of every day’ and showing ‘the
loveliness and the wonders of the world
before us . . .’
The reviews are remarkably similar, even down to some
of the descriptive adjectives criticizing Wordsworth’s most
personal poems: ‘flimsy, puerile thoughts, expressed in
such feeble halting verse we have seldom seen’, ‘nambypamby’ (British Critic); ‘puerile beyond the power of
imitation’ (Le Beau Monde); ‘nauseous and nauseating
sensibilities to weeds and insects’, ‘false taste and puerile
conceit’ (Critical Review); ‘a very paragon of silliness and
affectation’, ‘an insult on the public taste’, ‘namby-pamby’
(Edinburgh Review); ‘calculated to excite disgust and
anger in a lover of poetry’ (Poetical Register).
The main problem, as Francis Jeffrey wrote in the
Edinburgh Review, was Wordsworth’s use of subjects
that the ‘greater part of his readers will probably
persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting’. The
reviewer in The Satirist wondered how anyone could
think it worthwhile to write about his memories of
some daffodils blowing about in the wind; similarly,
the writer for the Annual Review excoriated
Wordsworth’s attaching of ‘exquisite emotions’ to
objects in which no one else had the slightest interest.
The poet, thundered Francis Jeffrey, had openly
violated ‘the established laws of poetry’.
Reviewers cited uninteresting subject themes and
the unreadability of The Ancient Mariner, with its
archaic style and murky philosophical theme.
Francis Jeffrey, one of the chief reviewers for the
influential Edinburgh Review, was so offended by
Wordsworth's flaunting of poetic convention in
the Lyrical Ballads that he engaged in a long and
vitriolic campaign against what he termed the
“Lake School of Poetry.”
Lyrical Ballads (1800) appeared in two volumes,
the first one reissuing – with revisions – Lyrical
Ballads (1798) and the second containing a
somewhat uneasy mixture of the Grasmere
poems of 1800 with the Goslar ones written in
1798–9. The second edition of the book shows
Wordsworth’s name as the author.
Paramount among those changes made in the
first volume of 1800 was Wordsworth’s
addition to it of a critical manifesto, a PREFACE
providing a lengthy theoretical justification for
the
works
to
follow.
Wordsworth’s
unshakeable faith in his own greatness and
originality created the Preface to Lyrical
Ballads to instruct his readers how to read
those poems.
Wordsworth defines poetry as “the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it
takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquility”. He also explains his views on the
elements on modern poetry.
This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is considered a
central work of Romantic literary theory. In
it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the
elements of a new type of poetry, one based
on the "real language of men" and which
avoids the poetic diction of much 18thcentury poetry.
Wordsworth explained in the Preface that he
sought to use vernacular language and to
write about simple uneducated country
people as that, to him, was a more "poetic"
and "truthful" language than the more formal
poetic diction of his day, which he thought
artificial and insufficient to "celebrate" the
beauty of the natural world.
He also said:
"The majority of the following poems are to be
considered as experiments. They were written
chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the
language of conversation in the middle and
lower classes of society is adapted to the
purpose of poetic pleasure."
MAJOR ARGUMENTS
On the 'Subject and Language of Poetry':
"The principal object […] was to choose
incidents and situations from common life.“
Wordsworth justifies this by adding that our
elementary feelings and passions can grow
better in a field of rural life, which is built upon
elementary feelings, and they may also be
contemplated and communicated better than
any other writer at the time.
"[D]escribe [those incidents] […] in a
selection of language really used by men.
The rural men far from social vanity use
their language to express feelings in a
simple and unelaborated manner, more in
connection with nature. He also claims that
such a language is more permanent and
philosophical because it results from
"repeated experience and regular feelings".
"[T]hrow over them a certain colouring of
imagination, whereby ordinary things should
be presented to the mind in an unusual way.“
"[M]ake these incidents and situations
interesting by tracing in them, truly though
not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our
nature."
But in the long view other aspects of his
Preface have been no less significant in
establishing its importance, not only as a
turning point in English criticism but also as a
central document in modem culture,
Wordsworth feared that a new urban,
industrial society's mass media and mass
culture were threatening to blunt the human
mind's "discriminatory powers“ and to "reduce
it to a state of almost savage torpor."
He attributed to imaginative literature the
primary role in keeping the human beings
who live in such societies emotionally alive
and morally sensitive. Literature, that is,
could keep humans essentially human.
The Preface also contains his now famous
definition of poetry as being,
"the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings from emotions recollected in
tranquility".
In his concentration on nature, Wordsworth
showed love of nature at its most sublime, of
mountains and of wild scenery, and this was in
sharp contrast to the view that nature only
after it had been manipulated by human
hands, such as in landscape gardening, could
then be considered a suitable subject for art
and poetry.
1798-99
William, Dorothy and Coleridge then began their
voyage to Germany where they encountered a
terrible winter in 1789-1799. Coleridge soon went
his own way and spent much of his time in
university towns. Dorothy and William lived in
Goslar where Wordsworth began his work on The
Prelude and other famous poems such as The Lucy
Poems.
1799
Return to the Lake District
William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy
move back to Lake District and settle in the
village of Grasmere. Wordsworth lives in
Grasmere for the rest of his life. He has
begun work on an autobiographical poem
about his experience in France. During his life
Wordsworth calls the unpublished work the
"poem to Coleridge;" it is later known as The
Prelude.
The final edition of the Wordsworth Lyrical
Ballads was published in 1805.
1802
Family Matters
William and Dorothy Wordsworth travel to
France so that Wordsworth can meet his
daughter—Caroline—and make arrangements
for her support with Annette Vallon. When he
returns to England, Wordsworth marries Mary
Hutchinson, a schoolmate and longtime friend.
1805
Prelude Finished; Brother Dies
Wordsworth finishes his "poem to Coleridge"
but refuses to publish it until he has completed
The Recluse, a long piece for which the "poem
to Coleridge" would be a prologue. William's
younger brother, 33-year-old John Wordsworth,
dies in a shipwreck.
1807
Poems in Two Volumes.
Wordsworth publishes the collection Poems in
Two Volumes. The book contains the poem "Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood."
Up to this point Wordsworth was known publicly
only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this
collection would cement his reputation. Its
reception was lukewarm, however.
His sister Dorothy continued to live with
Wordsworth, along with his new wife and her
sister, Sara Hutchinson. They were often visited
by Coleridge, who had moved to the Lake
District with his wife, and who had become
emotionally involved with Sara Hutchinson.
1810
Wordsworth is growing estranged from
Coleridge, who is addicted to opium, and feels
burdened by his care. When Coleridge moves
out of Wordsworth's home in May and learns
that Wordsworth warned a mutual friend
against taking him in, he is distraught. The
men reconcile a few years later but are never
as close as they once were.
1813
Wordsworth Gets a Job
Wordsworth is appointed Distributor of
Stamps for Westmorland, a civil position that
pays him a salary of about 400 pounds per
year. The family moves to Rydal Mount, the
Grasmere home where he lives out the rest of
his life.
In 1814 Wordsworth published The Excursion,
9000 lines of poetry in nine volumes, which
aroused little interest. He continued to be
criticized for his low subjects and ‘simplicity’.
Thereafter he became more interested in
reworking, ordering and anthologizing his work
in various collected editions.
1815
The White Doe of Rylstone.
Preface to Lyrical Ballads revised.
1819
Peter Bell and The Waggoner.
1820
We Are Seven and The River Duddon (sonnets).
1822
Ecclesiastical Sketches.
1825
Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems.
1828
Tours the Rhineland with Coleridge.
1829
Dorothy Gets Sick
Dorothy Wordsworth comes down with a
serious illness that renders her an invalid
until her death in 1855.
1834
Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies.
1839
Honorary Degree
William Wordsworth receives an honorary
degree from Oxford University, to "thunders
of applause, repeated over and over."
Towards the end of his life, his disillusionment
with the French revolution had made him
more conservative in outlook. In 1839 he also
received a civil pension of £300 a year from
the government.
1842
Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late
Years.
1843
Poet Laureate
Wordsworth is named Poet Laureate of England.
Wordsworth was persuaded to become the
nation's poet laureate, despite saying he
wouldn't write any poetry as poet laureate.
Wordsworth is the only Poet Laureate who
never wrote poetry during his time as Poet
Laureate.
April 23, 1850
Wordsworth Dies
William Wordsworth dies of pleurisy. He is buried in
St. Oswald's Church in Grasmere. Later in life,
Wordsworth received several great honors which
some may find quite surprising due to the fact he
didn't write as much as other poets. When
Wordsworth died, he was considered by many to be
one of the greatest poets in the world, and some
still feel this way today.
A few months after his death, Mary
Wordsworth publishes The Prelude, the
autobiographical poem now considered to be
Wordsworth's masterpiece.
The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is an
autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse.
Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he
was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life
without publishing it.
He never gave it a title; he called it the
"Poem (title not yet fixed upon) to
Coleridge" and in his letters to Dorothy
Wordsworth referred to it as "the poem on
the growth of my own mind." The poem
was unknown to the general public until
published
three
months
after
Wordsworth's death in 1850, its final name
given to it by his widow Mary.
The poem was intended as the prologue to a
long three-part epic and philosophical poem,
The Recluse. Though Wordsworth planned
this project when he was in his late 20s, he
went to his grave at 80 years old having
written to some completion only The Prelude
and the second part (The Excursion), leaving
no more than fragments of the rest.
Wordsworth planned to write this work
together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, their
joint intent being to surpass John Milton's
Paradise Lost.
Had The Recluse been
completed, it would have been approximately
three times longer than Paradise Lost (33,000
lines versus 10,500).
Often, in his letters, Wordsworth commented
that he was plagued with agony because he
failed to finish the work
In the 1850
introduction, Wordsworth explains what the
original idea, inspired by his "dear friend"
Coleridge, was: "to compose a philosophical
Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and
Society, and to be entitled the Recluse; as
having for its principal subject, the sensations
and opinions of a poet living in retirement.”
The work is a poetic reflection on
Wordsworth's own sense of his poetic
vocation as it developed over the course of
his life. But its focus and mood present a
sharp fundamental fall away from the
neoclassical and into the Romantic. Whilst
Milton (mentioned by name in line 181 of
Book One) in Paradise Lost rewrites God's
creation and The Fall of Man so as to "justify
the ways of God to man," Wordsworth
chooses his own mind and imagination as a
subject worthy of epic.
This spiritual autobiography evolves out of
Wordsworth's "persistent metaphor [that life is] a
circular journey whose end is 'to arrive where we
started / And know that place for the first time’.
Wordsworth's Prelude opens with a literal
journey [during his manhood] whose chosen goal
[...] is the Vale of Grasmere.
The Prelude narrates a number of later
journeys, most notably the crossing of
the Alps in Book VI and, in the beginning
of the final book, the climactic ascent of
Snowdon. In the course of the poem,
such literal journeys become the
metaphorical vehicle for a spiritual
journey—the quest within the poet's
memory [...]".
'SPOTS OF TIME' important moments in The
Prelude are for Wordsworth past experiences
through which he can trace his own
development, as a man and as a poet, and
which continue to resonate with new
meanings many years after the events.
Many of Wordsworth's 'spots of time' arise
out of moments of activity, such as iceskating, horse riding or climbing a
mountain. Others come in response to a
particular feeling, such as guilt after
stealing a rowing boat; or a time of
emotional intensity, such as the death of
his father.
Stealing a boat (Book I, ls 372-427)
This spot of time is a good example of the way in which
Wordsworth projects his own feelings onto a landscape.
His feeling of 'troubled pleasure' on stealing the boat is
given substance by the looming mountains, which
eventually become 'the trouble of my dreams'.
I struck, and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff,
Rose up between me and the stars, and still,
With measured motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me.
Ice-skating (Book I, ls 452-489)
This is a memory from Wordsworth's school days. It
describes ice-skating on frozen Esthwaite Water at
night. The centre of the experience is the way in
which the people and the landscape are all involved:
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din,
Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees, and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron
Climbing Snowdon (Book XIII, ls 1-119)
This is the imaginative vision with which the
poem concludes. Here Wordsworth moves
from describing the sights and sounds of the
scene to imagining what might lie behind it.
... and from the shore
At distance not the third part of a mile
Was a blue chasm; a fracture in the vapour,
A deep and gloomy breathing-place, through
which
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice.
The universal spectacle throughout
Was shaped for admiration and delight,
Grand in itself alone, but in that breach
Through which the homeless voice of waters rose,
That dark deep thoroughfare, had Nature lodged
The Soul, the Imagination of the whole.
Wordsworth’s Achievement
NATURE: in all its forms, was important
to Wordsworth, but he rarely uses simple
descriptions. Instead he concentrates on
the ways in which he responds and
relates to the world. He uses his poetry
to look at the relationship between
nature and human life, and to explore
the belief that nature can have an impact
on our emotional and spiritual lives.
Throughout Wordsworth’s work, nature provides
the ultimate good influence on the human mind. All
manifestations of the natural world—from the
highest mountain to the simplest flower—elicit
noble, elevated thoughts and passionate emotions
in the people who observe these manifestations.
Wordsworth repeatedly emphasizes the importance
of nature to an individual’s intellectual and spiritual
development. A good relationship with nature
helps individuals connect to both the spiritual and
the social worlds.
As Wordsworth explains in The Prelude, a love of
nature can lead to a love of humankind. In such
poems as “The World Is Too Much with Us” (1807)
and “London, 1802” (1807) people become selfish
and immoral when they distance themselves from
nature by living in cities. Humanity’s innate
empathy and nobility of spirit becomes corrupted
by artificial social conventions as well as by the
squalor of city life. In contrast, people who spend
a lot of time in nature, such as laborers and
farmers, retain the purity and nobility of their
souls.
THE POWER OF THE HUMAN MIND
Wordsworth praised the power of the human mind.
Using memory and imagination, individuals could
overcome difficulty and pain. For instance, the
speaker in “Tintern Abbey” (1798) relieves his
loneliness with memories of nature, while the leech
gatherer in “Resolution and Independence” (1807)
perseveres cheerfully in the face of poverty by the
exertion of his own will. The transformative powers
of the mind are available to all, regardless of an
individual’s class or background. This democratic
view emphasizes individuality and uniqueness.
Throughout his work, Wordsworth showed strong
support for the political, religious, and artistic rights
of the individual, including the power of his or her
mind. In the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads,
Wordsworth explained the relationship between
the mind and poetry. Poetry is “emotion recollected
in tranquility”—that is, the mind transforms the
raw emotion of experience into poetry capable of
giving pleasure. Later poems, such as “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality” (1807), imagine nature
as the source of the inspiring material that
nourishes the active, creative mind.
IMAGINATION
Wordsworth saw imagination as a powerful,
active force that works alongside our senses,
interpreting the way we view the world and
influencing how we react to events. He believed
that a strong imaginative life is essential for our
well-being. Often in Wordsworth's poetry, his
intense imaginative effort translates into the
great visionary moments of his work
SOCIETY
Wordsworth is often considered to be an egocentric
poet interested only in himself, his experiences and
his development, but this is not quite a fair
reflection. He supported social reform and believed
in what were popularly known as The Rights of Man,
the rights to individual freedoms of thought and
expression, the right to justice. Society was
undergoing huge changes, and the drive for
economic prosperity led to an increase in both urban
and rural poverty. Wordsworth explores the impact
of such changes on the emotional and spiritual lives
of
the
characters
in
his
poems.
RELATIONSHIPS
Wordsworth was not living and working in
isolation; his friends and family were an
important source of support and inspiration. Of
his sister Dorothy, he wrote, 'She gave me eyes,
she gave me ears', and, by his own admission,
the best two lines in the poem I wandered
lonely as a cloud were by his wife Mary.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge were among the first British
poets to explore the new theories and
ideas that were sweeping through
Europe. Their poems display many
characteristics of Romanticism:
An emphasis on the emotions (a fashionable
word at the beginning of the period was
‘sensibility’. This meant having, or
cultivating, a sensitive, emotional and
intuitive way of understanding the world).
Exploring the relationship between nature
and human life.
A stress on the importance of personal
experiences and a desire to understand
what influences the human mind.
A belief in the power of the imagination.
An interest in mythological, fantastical,
gothic and supernatural themes.
An emphasis on the sublime (this word was
used to describe a spiritual awareness, which
could be stimulated by a grand and awesome
landscape).
Social and political idealism.