Wordsworth'smagnum opus is generally considered to beThe Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was generally known as "The Poem to Coleridge".
Wordsworth wasPoet Laureate from 1843 until his death frompleurisy on 23 April 1850. He remains one of the most recognizable names in English poetry and was a key figure of the Romantic poets.
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in what is now namedWordsworth House inCockermouth, Cumberland (now in Cumbria),[1] part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as theLake District. William's sister, the poet and diaristDorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John Wordsworth, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was captain, theEarl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; andChristopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master ofTrinity College, Cambridge.[2]
Wordsworth's father was a legal representative ofJames Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. He was frequently away from home on business, so the young William and his siblings had little involvement with him and remained distant until he died in 1783.[3] However, he did encourage William in his reading, and in particular, set him to commit large portions of verse to memory, including works byMilton,Shakespeare andSpenser which William would pore over in his father's library. William also spent time at his mother's parents' house inPenrith, Cumberland, where he was exposed to the moors but did not get along with his grandparents or uncle, who also lived there. His hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide.[4]
Wordsworth was taught to read by his mother, and he first attended a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth, then a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families. He was taught there by Ann Birkett, who instilled in her students traditions that included pursuing scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day andShrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and theSpectator, but little else. At the school in Penrith, he met the Hutchinsons, including Mary Hutchinson, who later became his wife.[5]
After the death of Wordsworth's mother, in 1778, his father sent him toHawkshead Grammar School inLancashire (now inCumbria) and sent Dorothy to live with relatives inYorkshire. She and William did not meet again for nine years.
Wordsworth debuted as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet inThe European Magazine. That same year he began attendingSt John's College, Cambridge. He received his BA degree in 1791.[6] He returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at Cambridge and often spent later holidays onwalking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of theirlandscape. In 1790, he went on a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured theAlps extensively and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.[7]
In November 1791, Wordsworth visitedRevolutionary France and became enchanted with the Republican movement. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, the daughter of a French Royalist,[8] who, in 1792, gave birth to their daughter Caroline. Financial problems andBritain's tense relations with France forced him to return to England alone the following year.[9] The circumstances of his return and subsequent behaviour raised doubts about his declared wish to marry Annette. However, he supported her and his daughter as best he could in later life. TheReign of Terror left Wordsworth thoroughly disillusioned with the French Revolution, and in December 1792 or January 1793 his family discontinued the allowance he had been living on and recalled him to England.[8]
With thePeace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy visited Annette and Caroline inCalais. The purpose of the visit was to prepare Annette for the fact of his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson.[9] Afterwards, he wrote the sonnet "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free", recalling a seaside walk with the nine-year-old Caroline, whom he had never seen before that visit. Mary was anxious that Wordsworth should do more for Caroline. Upon Caroline's marriage, in 1816, Wordsworth settled £30 a year on her (equivalent to £2,400 in 2021), payments which continued until 1835, when they were replaced by a capital settlement.[10][11]
I met a little cottage girl: She was eight years old, she said; Her hair was thick with many a curl That clustered round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air, And she was wildly clad; Her eyes were fair, and very fair; - Her beauty made me glad.
“Sisters and brothers, little maid, How many may you be?” “How many? Seven in all,” she said, And wondering looked at me.
“And where are they? I pray you tell.” She answered, “Seven are we; And two of us at Conway dwell, And two are gone to sea;
“Two of us in the churchyard lie, My sister and my brother; And, in the churchyard cottage, I Dwell near them with my mother.”
“My stockings there I often knit; My kerchief there I hem; And there upon the ground I sit, And sing a song to them.
“And often after sunset, sir, When it is light and fair, I take my little porringer, And eat my supper there.
“How many are you, then,” said I, “If they two are in heaven?” Quick was the little maid’s reply: “O Master! we are seven.”
“But they are dead; those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven!” - ’T was throwing words away; for still The little maid would have her will, And said, “Nay, we are seven!”
The year 1793 saw the first publication of poems by Wordsworth in the collectionsAn Evening Walk andDescriptive Sketches. In 1795, he received a legacy of £900 fromRaisley Calvert and was able to pursue a career as a poet.
It was also in 1795 that he metSamuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. For two years from 1795, William and his sister Dorothy lived at Racedown House in Dorset—a property of the Pinney family—to the west ofPilsdon Pen. They walked in the area for about two hours daily, and the nearby hills consoled Dorothy as she pined for the fells of her native Lakeland. She wrote,
"We have hills which, seen from a distance, almost take the character of mountains, some cultivated nearly to their summits, others in their wild state covered withfurze and broom. These delight me the most as they remind me of our native wilds."[14]
In 1797, the pair moved toAlfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home inNether Stowey. Together Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) producedLyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the EnglishRomantic movement.[15] The volume gave neither Wordsworth's nor Coleridge's name as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in this collection, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as the author and included a preface to the poems.[16] It was augmented significantly in the next edition, published in 1802.[17] In this preface, which some scholars consider a central work of Romantic literary theory, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of verse, one that is based on the ordinary language "really used by men" while avoiding the poetic diction of much 18th-century verse. Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility", and calls his own poems in the book "experimental". A fourth and final edition ofLyrical Ballads was published in 1805.[18]
Between 1795 and 1797, Wordsworth wrote his only play,The Borderers, a verse tragedy set during the reign ofKing Henry III of England, when Englishmen in the North Country came into conflict with Scottishborder reivers. He attempted to get the play staged in November 1797. However, it was rejected byThomas Harris, the manager of theCovent Garden Theatre, who proclaimed it "impossible that the play should succeed in the representation". The rebuff was not received lightly by Wordsworth, and the play was not published until 1842, after substantial revisions.[19]
Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge travelled to Germany in the autumn of 1798. While Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the journey, its main effect on Wordsworth was to produce homesickness.[9] During the harsh winter of 1798–99, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy inGoslar, and, despite extreme stress and loneliness, began work on the autobiographical piece that was later titledThe Prelude. He wrote several other famous poems in Goslar, including "The Lucy poems". In the Autumn of 1799, Wordsworth and his sister returned to England and visited the Hutchinson family at Sockburn. When Coleridge arrived back in England, he travelled to the North with their publisher, Joseph Cottle, to meet Wordsworth and undertake a proposed tour of the Lake District. This was the immediate cause of the brother and sister's settling atDove Cottage inGrasmere in the Lake District, this time with another poet,Robert Southey, nearby. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey came to be known as the "Lake Poets".[21] Throughout this period, many of Wordsworth's poems revolved around themes of death, endurance, separation and grief.
Dove Cottage (Town End, Grasmere) – home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1799–1808; home ofThomas De Quincey, 1809–1820
In 1802, Lowther's heir,William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, paid the £4,000 (equivalent to £451,114 in 2023) owed to Wordsworth's father through Lowther's failure to pay his aide.[22] It was this repayment that afforded Wordsworth the financial means to marry. On 4 October, following his visit with Dorothy to France to arrange matters with Annette, Wordsworth married his childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson, atAll Saints' Church, Brompton.[9] Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, three of whom predeceased her and William:
Rev. John Wordsworth MA (18 June 1803 – 25 July 1875). Vicar of Brigham, Cumberland and Rector of Plumbland, Cumberland. Buried atHighgate Cemetery (west side). Married four times:[23]
Isabella Curwen (died 1848) had six children: Jane Stanley, Henry, William, John, Charles and Edward.
Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to callThe Recluse.[26] In 1798–99 he started an autobiographical poem, which he referred to as the "poem to Coleridge" and which he planned would serve as an appendix to a larger work calledThe Recluse. In 1804, he began expanding this autobiographical work, having decided to make it a prologue rather than an appendix.[27] He completed this work, now generally referred to as the first version ofThe Prelude, in 1805, but refused to publish such a personal work until he had completed the whole ofThe Recluse. The death of his brother John, also in 1805, affected him strongly and may have influenced his decisions about these works.
Rydal Mount – home to Wordsworth 1813–1850. Hundreds of visitors came here to see him over the years
Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances, as articulated inThe Prelude and in such shorter works as "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" have been a source of critical debate. It was long supposed that Wordsworth relied chiefly on Coleridge for philosophical guidance. However, scholars have recently suggested that Wordsworth's ideas may have been formed years before he and Coleridge became friends in the mid-1790s. In particular, while he was in revolutionary Paris in 1792, the 22-year-old Wordsworth met the mysterious travellerJohn "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822),[28] who was nearing the end of his thirty years of wandering, on foot, fromMadras, India, throughPersia andArabia, across Africa and Europe, and up through the fledgling United States. By the time of their association, Stewart had published an ambitious work of original materialist philosophy entitledThe Apocalypse of Nature (London, 1791), to which many of Wordsworth's philosophical sentiments may well be indebted.
In 1810, Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction,[9] and in 1812, his son Thomas died at the age of 6, six months after the death of 3-year-old Catherine. The following year, he received an appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, and the stipend of £400 a year made him financially secure, albeit at the cost of political independence. In 1813, he and his family, including Dorothy, moved toRydal Mount,Ambleside (between Grasmere and Rydal Water), where he spent the rest of his life.[9]
In 1814, Wordsworth publishedThe Excursion as the second part of the three-part workThe Recluse even though he never completed the first or third parts. He did, however, write a poetic Prospectus toThe Recluse in which he laid out the structure and intention of the whole work. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature:
... my voice proclaims How exquisitely the individual Mind (And the progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external World Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too— Theme this but little heard of among Men, The external World is fitted to the Mind; And the creation (by no lower name Can it be called) which they with blended might Accomplish ...[29]
Some modern critics[30] suggest that there was a decline in his work beginning around the mid-1810s, perhaps because most of the concerns that characterised his early poems (loss, death, endurance, separation and abandonment) had been resolved in his writings and his life.[31] By 1820, he was enjoying considerable success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works.
The poet and artist William Blake, who knew Wordsworth's work, was struck by Wordsworth's boldness in centring his poetry on the human mind. In response to Wordsworth's poetic programme that, “when we look / Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man– / My haunt, and the main region of my song” (The Excursion), William Blake wrote to his friend Henry Crabb Robinson that the passage " caused him a bowel complaint which nearly killed him”.[32]
Following the death of his friend, the painterWilliam Green in 1823, Wordsworth also mended his relations with Coleridge.[33] The two were fully reconciled by 1828 when they toured theRhineland together.[9] Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 and she remained ill for the remainder of her life. Coleridge andCharles Lamb both died in 1834, their loss being a difficult blow to Wordsworth. The following year saw the passing ofJames Hogg. Despite the death of many contemporaries, the popularity of his poetry ensured a steady stream of young friends and admirers to replace those he lost.
Wordsworth's youthful political radicalism, unlike Coleridge's, never led him to rebel against his religious upbringing. He remarked in 1812 that he was willing to shed his blood for the establishedChurch of England, reflected in hisEcclesiastical Sketches of 1822. This religious conservatism also coloursThe Excursion (1814), a long poem that became extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It features three central characters: the Wanderer, who "loved to pace the public roads", the Solitary, who has experienced the hopes and miseries of theFrench Revolution, and the Pastor, who dominates the last third of the poem.[34]
Behler[35] has pointed out the fact that Wordsworth wanted to invoke the basic feeling that a human heart possesses and expresses. He had reversed the philosophical standpoint expressed by his friendS. T. Coleridge, of 'creating the characters in such an environment so that the public feels them belonging to the distant place and time'. And this philosophical realisation by Wordsworth indeed allowed him to choose the language and structural patterning of the poetry that a common person used every day.[36] Kurland wrote that the conversational aspect of a language emerges through social necessity.[37] Social necessity posits the theme of possessing the proper knowledge, interest and biases also among the speakers. William Wordsworth has used conversation in his poetry to let the poet 'I' merge into 'We'. The poem "Farewell" exposes the identical emotion that the poet and his sister nourish:
"We leave you here in solitude to dwell/ With these our latest gifts of tender thought;
Thou, like the morning, in thy saffron coat,/ Bright gowan, and marsh-marigold, farewell!" (L. 19–22).
This kind of conversational tone persists throughout the poet's poetic journey, which positions him as a man in society who speaks to the purpose of communion with the very common mass of that society.[38] Again;"Preface to Lyrical Ballads" is the evidence where the poet expresses why he is writing and what he is writing and what purpose it will serve humanity.
Wordsworth remained a formidable presence in his later years. In 1837, the Scottish poet and playwrightJoanna Baillie reflected on her long acquaintance with Wordsworth. "He looks like a man that one must not speak to unless one has some sensible thing to say. However, he does occasionally converse cheerfully & well, and when one knows how benevolent & excellent he is, it disposes one to be very much pleased with him."[39]
In 1838, Wordsworth received an honorary doctorate in Civil Law from theUniversity of Durham. The following year he was awarded the same honorary degree by the University of Oxford, whenJohn Keble praised him as the "poet of humanity", praise greatly appreciated by Wordsworth.[9][40] (It has been argued that Wordsworth was a significant influence on Keble's immensely popular book of devotional poetry,The Christian Year (1827).[41]) In 1842, the government awarded him a Civil List pension of £300 a year.
Following the death of Robert Southey in 1843, Wordsworth becamePoet Laureate. He initially refused the honour, saying that he was too old, but accepted when the Prime Minister,Robert Peel, assured him that "you shall have nothing required of you". Wordsworth thus became the only poet laureate to write no official verses. The sudden death of his daughter Dora in 1847 at age 42 was difficult for the ageing poet to take, and in his depression, he ultimately gave up writing new material.
Gravestone of William Wordsworth,Grasmere, Cumbria
William Wordsworth died at home at Rydal Mount from an aggravated case ofpleurisy on 23 April 1850,[42][43] and was buried atSt Oswald's Church, Grasmere. His widow, Mary, published his lengthy autobiographical "Poem to Coleridge" asThe Prelude several months after his death.[44] Though it failed to interest people at the time, it has since come to be widely recognised as his masterpiece.[45][46][47]
Dominick Argento set eight Wordsworth poems in his song cycleTo be Sung Upon the Water (1973).[48]
Arnold Bax set the poem "To the Cuckoo" in 1900 while a student.[49]
Richard Rodney Bennett setIntimations of Immortality for a cappella chorus and one instrument in 2000.[50]
Benjamin Britten set a passage fromThe Prelude (beginning "But that night, When on my bed I lay") in his song cycleNocturne (1958).
Alicia Van Buren (1860–1922) used the text of "Lines Written in Early Spring" for her song "In Early Spring".[51]
Ronald Corp has set passages fromThe Prelude within his cantataLaudamus (1994) and various poems in his song cyclesThe Music of Wordsworth andFlower of Cities.
George Dyson'sQuo Vadis for chorus and orchestra, written between 1936 and 1945, includes a setting of "Our birth is but a sleep" (fromIntimations of Immortality).[52]
Charles Ives set "I travelled among unknown men" in 1901. His workThe Rainbow (1914) for chamber orchestra is described as "after the poem by William Wordsworth". He also set the text as a song.
Arthur Somervell set eight sections from "On the Power of Sound" as a cantata for chorus and orchestra in 1894.[57] HisMeditation on Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality for baritone solo and chorus, was first premiered in 1907 but re-written in 1934.[58]
Isaac Asimov's 1966novelisation of the 1966 filmFantastic Voyage sees Dr. Peter Duval quoting Wordsworth'sThe Prelude as the miniaturised submarine sails through the cerebral fluid surrounding a human brain, comparing it to the "strange seas of thought".
^Allport, Denison Howard; Friskney, Norman J. (1986). "Appendix A (Past Governors)".A Short History of Wilson's School. Wilson's School Charitable Trust.
^Wordsworth, William (1800).Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems. Vol. I (2 ed.). London: Printed for T.N. Longman and O. Rees. Retrieved13 November 2014.;Wordsworth, William (1800).Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems. Vol. II (2 ed.). London: Printed for T.N. Longman and O. Rees. Retrieved13 November 2014. via archive.org
^Wordsworth, William (1805).Lyrical Ballads with Pastoral and other Poems. Vol. I (4 ed.). London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, by R. Taylor. Retrieved13 November 2014. via archive.org.
^Poetical Works. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford U.P. 1936. p. 590.
^Hartman, Geoffrey (1987).Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787–1814. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 329–331.ISBN9780674958210.
^Already in 1891James Kenneth Stephen wrote satirically of Wordsworth having "two voices": one is "of the deep", the other "of an old half-witted sheep/Which bleats articulate monotony" ("A Sonnet" ["Two voices are there"]).
^Abrams, M.H. (1971).Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. Norton. p. 24.
^Stewart-Green, Miriam (1980).Women composers: a checklist of works for the solo voice. A Reference publication in women's studies. Boston, Mass: G.K. Hall. p. 60.ISBN978-0-8161-8498-9.
^abcdeM. H. Abrams, editor ofThe Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period, writes of these five poems: "This and the four following pieces are often grouped by editors as the 'Lucy poems,' even though 'A slumber did my spirit seal' does not identify the 'she' who is the subject of that poem. All but the last were written in 1799, while Wordsworth and his sister were homesick in Germany. There has been diligent speculation about Lucy's identity, but it remains speculative. The one certainty is that she is not the girl of Wordsworth's 'Lucy Gray'" (Abrams 2000).
Mary Moorman,William Wordsworth, A Biography: The Early Years, 1770–1803 v. 1, Oxford University Press, 1957,ISBN978-0198115656
Mary Moorman,William Wordsworth: A Biography: The Later Years, 1803–1850 v. 2, Oxford University Press, 1965,ISBN978-0198116172
M. R. Tewari,One Interior Life – A Study of the Nature of Wordsworth's Poetic Experience (New Delhi: S. Chand & Company Ltd, 1983)
Report to Wordsworth, Written by Boey Kim Cheng, as a direct reference to his poems "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" and "The World Is Too Much with Us"
Daniel Robinson,The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, Oxford University Press, 2015,ISBN9780199662128
