William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
England

"There is a comfort in the strenth of love;/ 'Twill make a thing endurable, which else/ Would overset the brain, or break the heart..."-William Wordsworth

Wordsworth lived a happy childhood, and was schooled in Latin, Greek, and mathematics by a teacher who encouraged his poetic imagination. During the eight years he lived in Hawkshead while attending the local grammar school, Wordsworth spent his time engaging in activities in the open countryside. These years shaped his love for nature and the basis of his poetry. At St. John's College in Cambridge, Wordsworth enjoyed the classics as well as the moderns, grasped the Italian language, and dreamed of nature. He left St. Johns in 1791 without distinction and utterly beyond himself of what he was to do in the future. He decided, however, to become a traveling tutor and set out for France in November. In France, he fell in love, fathered a child, and devoted himself to French Republicanism. A subsequent war between France and England brought him back to his native country. During 1893, he acquainted himself with William Godwin, Joseph Fawcett, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Consequently, he converted to Godwin's social radicalism. In 1797, he and his sister Dorothy collaborated with Coleridge in the production of Lyrical Ballads. In 1800, Wordsworth finished The Prelude. In 1802 he reunited with his lover and his daughter and wrote Ode: Intimations of Immortality. He offered to support his daughter financially, yet he married another woman. The next ten years, he fathered 5 children and published more poems and a political tract. In 1812, he experienced the loss of two of his children and reconciled with Coleridge. From 1814 to the end of his life, he traveled extensively and published a great many volumes of poetry, sketches, and other miscellaneous prose work. He died a Poet Laureate in 1843.

Criticism

Wordsworth possessed a unique perception of his surroundings. He saw things in nature that others did not see, and this power over his contemporaries allowed him to write the most graceful, imaginative and fantastic poetry. His regard for commonplace things was directly displayed in many of his poems, which in effect changed the diction of English poetry considerably. He professed an awareness for human emotions which shaped his original and individualistic form of poetry. With the failure of the French Revolution, he and Coleridge determined to improve the world with their poetry. Wordsworth also believed in his own version of the "oversoul:"

And I have felt
A presence that distrubs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (Noyes 239-240)

Wordsworth's poetry was a little ahead of its time; however, it instigated Romanticism in England through its emotional nature and its allusions to nature. His work has had a profound legacy on Victorian and twentieth-century literature as well. Yet his ultimate goal was the betterment of mankind through the discovery of an individual's own joy and emotions.

Works

An Evening Walk (1793)
Descriptive Sketches (1793)
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
"Tintern Abbey"
"The Tables Turned"
The Prelude (1805)
Poems in Two Volumes (1807)
"Ode to Duty"
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
The Excursion (1814)
"Laodamia" (1815)
"White Doe of Rylstone" (1815)
Memorials of a Tour of a Continent (1822)
"Yarrow Revisited" (1835)

Sources:

Noyes, Russell. English Romantic Poetry and Prose. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.