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.
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