WILLIAM WORDSWORTH - 5^C LINGUISTICO

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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Here you can find my previous post about William Wordsworth, a major English Romantic poet, well-known for his celebration of nature.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH - 5^D LINGUISTICO

Here you can explore the Wordsworth Museum which is next door to Dove Cottage  - it was in this little cottage, at times "crammed edge full" with people, in the heart of the remote Lake District, that William Wordsworth wrote some of the greatest poetry in the English language.

SEPTEMBER

"Departing summer hath assumed

An aspect tenderly illumed,

The gentlest look of spring;

That calls from yonder leafy shade

Unfaded, yet prepared to fade,

A timely carolling."

William Wordsworth

ROMANTICISM IN LITERATURE AND ART

“In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man.”

William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads"

Discovering Literature: The Romantics

Introduction to Romanticism

Romanticism

The Basics of Art: The Romantic Period

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH ~ COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE

This sonnet conveys some of the emotions felt by William Wordsworth while crossing Westminster Bridge on an early September morning 1802. It is an Italian sonnet, written in iambic pentameter, the rhyme scheme of the poem is abbaabbacdcdcd.
Sonnets were traditionally the way love poems were written, so it could be claimed that this is a love poem to the city of London in the morning.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

   Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

   A sight so touching in its majesty:

   This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

   Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

   Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

   All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. 

Never did sun more beautifully steep

   In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

   Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will: 

   Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

   And all that mighty heart is lying still!

https://youtu.be/LdIId6uG6xI

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.