William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth.
Born
7 April 1770
Wordsworth House,
Cockermouth, England
Died
23 April 1850 (aged 80)
Cumberland, England
Occupation Poet
Genres Poetry
Literary
movement
Romanticism
Notable
work(s)
Lyrical Ballads, Poems in
Two Volumes, The
Excursion
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 23 April 1850) was a major English
Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the
Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical
Ballads.
Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a
semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded
a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it
was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge." Wordsworth was Britain's
Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
Early life
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson,
William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in
Cockermouth, Cumberland
[1]
part of the scenic region in northwest
England, the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy
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, born after Dorothy, who went to sea
and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was Master, Earl of Abergavenny
was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest,
who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge.
[2]
Their father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st
Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the
small town. Wordsworth, as with his siblings, had little involvement with
their father, and they would be distant with him until his death in 1783.
[3]

Wordsworth's father, although rarely present, did teach him poetry, including
that of Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser, in addition to allowing his son to
rely on his own father's library. Along with spending time reading in
Cockermouth, Wordsworth would also stay at his mother's parents house in
Penrith, Cumberland. At Penrith, Wordsworth was exposed to the moors.
Wordsworth could not get along with his grandparents and his uncle, and his
hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating
suicide.
[4]

After the death of their mother, in 1778, John Wordsworth sent William to
Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire and Dorothy to live with relatives
in Yorkshire; she and William would not meet again for another nine years.
Although Hawkshead was Wordsworth's first serious experience with
education, he had been taught to read by his mother and had attended a tiny
school of low quality in Cockermouth. After the Cockermouth school, he was
sent to a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families and taught
by Ann Birkett, a woman who insisted on instilling in her students traditions
that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the
festivals around Easter, May Day, and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was
taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school
that Wordsworth was to meet the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who would
be his future wife.
[5]

Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet
in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's
College, Cambridge, and received his B.A. degree in 1791.
[6]
He returned to
Hawkshead for his first two summer holidays, and often spent later holidays
on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In
1790, he took a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps
extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.
Relationship with Annette Vallon
In November 1791, Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France and became
enthralled with the Republican movement. He fell in love with a French
woman, Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave birth to their child, Caroline.
Because of lack of money and Britain's tensions with France, he returned
alone to England the next year.
[7]
The circumstances of his return and his
subsequent behaviour raise doubts as to his declared wish to marry Annette,
but he supported her and his daughter as best he could in later life. In 1802,
he visited Calais with his sister Dorothy and met Annette and his daughter
Caroline. The purpose of the visit was to pave the way for his forthcoming
marriage to Mary Hutchinson. Afterwards he wrote the poem "It is a
beauteous evening, calm and free," recalling his seaside walk with his
daughter, whom he had not seen for ten years. At the conception of this
poem, he had never seen his daughter before. The occurring lines reveal his
deep love for both child and mother. The Reign of Terror estranged him from
the Republican movement, and war between France and Britain prevented
him from seeing Annette and Caroline again for several years. There are
strong suggestions that Wordsworth may have been depressed and
emotionally unsettled in the mid-1790s.
[citation needed]

With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802
Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, visited Annette and Caroline in France
and arrived at a mutually agreeable settlement regarding Wordsworth's
obligations.
[7]

First publication and Lyrical Ballads
In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads", which is called the "manifesto" of English
Romantic criticism, Wordsworth calls his poems "experimental." The year
1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the collections An
Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He received a legacy of 900 from
Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing poetry. That year, he
met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed
a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to
Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in
Nether Stowey. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from
Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English
Romantic movement. The volume gave neither Wordsworth's nor Coleridge's
name as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey",
was published in the work, 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, which was augmented
significantly in the 1802 edition. This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is
considered a central work of Romantic literarture 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
eighteenth-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth gives his famous definition of
poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin
from emotion recollected in tranquility." A fourth and final edition of Lyrical
Ballads was published in 1805.
Marriage and Children
In 1802, after Wordsworth's return from his trip to France with Dorothy to
visit Annette and Caroline, Lowther's heir, William Lowther, 1st Earl of
Lonsdale, paid the 4,000 debt owed to Wordsworth's father incurred through
Lowther's failure to pay his aide.
[10]
Later that year, Wordsworth married a
childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson.
[7]
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 William and Mary:
John Wordsworth (18 June 18031875). Married four times:
1. Isabella Curwen (d. 1848) had six children: Jane, Henry, William, John,
Charles and Edward.
2. Helen Ross (d. 1854). No issue.
3. Mary Ann Dolan (d. after 1858) had one daughter Dora (b.1858).
4. Mary Gamble. No issue.
Dora Wordsworth (16 August 1804 9 July 1847). Married Edward
Quillinan
Thomas Wordsworth (15 June 1806 1 December 1812).
Catherine Wordsworth (6 September 1808 4 June 1812).
William "Willy" Wordsworth (12 May 18101883). Married Fanny
Graham and had four children: Mary Louisa, William, Reginald,
Gordon.
Autobiographical work and Poems in Two Volumes
Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical
poem in three parts, which he intended to call The Recluse. He had in 1798
99 started an autobiographical poem, which he never named but called the
"poem to Coleridge", which would serve as an appendix to The Recluse. In
1804, he began expanding this autobiographical work, having decided to
make it a prologue rather than an appendix to the larger work he planned. By
1805, he had completed it, but refused to publish such a personal work until
he had completed the whole of The Recluse. The death of his brother, John, in
1805 affected him strongly.
The source of Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances as articulated in The
Prelude and in such shorter works as "Lines composed a few miles above
Tintern Abbey" has been the source of much critical debate. While it had
long been supposed that Wordsworth relied chiefly on Coleridge for
philosophical guidance, more recent scholarship has suggested that
Wordsworth's ideas may have been formed years before he and Coleridge
became friends in the mid 1790s. While in Revolutionary Paris in 1792, the
twenty-two year old Wordsworth made the acquaintance of the mysterious
traveller John "Walking" Stewart (17471822),
[11]
who was nearing the end
of a thirty-years' peregrination from Madras, India, through Persia and
Arabia, across Africa and all of Europe, and up through the fledgling United
States. By the time of their association, Stewart had published an ambitious
work of original materialist philosophy entitled The Apocalypse of Nature
(London, 1791), to which many of Wordsworth's philosophical sentiments
are likely indebted.
In 1807, his Poems in Two Volumes were published, including "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. For a time (starting in 1810), Wordsworth and Coleridge
were estranged over the latter's opium addiction.
[7]
Two of his children,
Thomas and Catherine, died in 1812. The following year, he received an
appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, and the 400 per
year income from the post made him financially secure. His family, including
Dorothy, moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside (between Grasmere and Rydal
Water) in 1813, where he spent the rest of his life.
[7]

The Prospectus
In 1814 he published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part The
Recluse. He had not completed the first and third parts, and never would. He
did, however, write a poetic Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he lays out
the structure and intent of the poem. 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.
Some modern critics
[who?]
recognize a decline in his works beginning around
the mid-1810s. But this decline was perhaps more a change in his lifestyle
and beliefs, since most of the issues that characterize his early poetry (loss,
death, endurance, separation and abandonment) were resolved in his writings.
But, by 1820, he enjoyed the success accompanying a reversal in the
contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works. Following the death of his
friend the painter William Green in 1823, Wordsworth mended relations with
Coleridge.
[12]
The two were fully reconciled by 1828, when they toured the
Rhineland together.
[7]
Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 that
rendered her an invalid for the remainder of her life. In 1835, Wordsworth
gave Annette and Caroline the money they needed for support.
The Poet Laureate and other honors
Wordsworth received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from
Durham University, and the same honor from Oxford University the next
year.
[7]
In 1842 the government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to
300 a year. With the death in 1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became
the Poet Laureate. He initially refused the honour, saying he was too old, but
accepted when Prime Minister Robert Peel assured him "you shall have
nothing required of you" (he became the only laureate to write no official
poetry). When his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry
came to a standstill.
Death
William Wordsworth died by re-aggravating a case of pleurisy on 23 April
1850, and was buried at St. Oswald's church in Grasmere. His widow Mary
published his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude
several months after his death. Though this failed to arouse great interest in
1850, it has since come to be recognized as his masterpiece.