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WordWorth | 1991-05-16 | 8KB | 114 lines

William Wordsworth


William Wordsworth was born on the 7th April 1770 at Cockermouth in Cumberland,
England.  He grew up in the beautiful lake district that was later to provide
inspiration for much of his poetry and philosophy.  His early boyhood was
marred by the tragedy that was to accompany him throughout life.  When he was
just eight years old his mother died,  followed by his father five years later.
From a young age, he was very aware that the way in which he lived would have a
profound influence upon his creativity.  He later put many of his experiences
into the largely autobiographical poem, The Prelude, recognising that this was
an unconventional method of writing poetry: "A thing unprecedented in literary
history that a man should talk so much about himself."

Strong contemporary opinion held that to use poetry to describe normal,
everyday occurrences was to demean the form.  Wordsworth, on the contrary, used
poetry to exalt the everyday and commonplace, believing it represented the
truest part of human nature.  In his poems: "Low and rustic life was generally
chosen, because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a
better soil in which they can attain their maturity. . . in that condition the
passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of
nature."

At the age of 17, Wordsworth was admitted to Cambridge University, and his
first published poem: Sonnet: On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a
Tale of Distress  was published in the same year. In 1790, with a college
friend, Robert Jones,  Wordsworth made the first of many walking tours to
France, also visiting Switzerland.  From this first visit, Wordsworth formed an
attachment to France and a love for the country that was to stay with him all
his life. After graduating, Wordsworth moved to France.

He had an affair with Annette Vallon in the spring of the following year at
Blois.  On Dec 15th 1792, she gave birth to his illegitimate daughter Caroline.
In 1793, Wordsworth returned to England.  From the following year he stayed
with his sister, Dorothy, who lived with him for most of her life, even after
his marriage.  In 1795 he was left 900 by Raisley Calvert, whom he had helped
to nurse during a long sickness.  This was a considerable amount of money, and
whilst he had never been poor, he became increasingly affluent.  He also met
Samuel Taylor Coleridge in this year, and formed the basis of the friendship
that would later result in the publication of the revolutionary Lyrical Ballads
.

The poems that Wordsworth had begun to write were revolutionary for many
reasons.  Most significantly, he succeeded in moving away from the conventional
poetry written by his contemporaries.  He hated stylized and flowery poetry,
and the use of rhetoric for the sake of rhetoric.  Wordsworth wanted to write
simply, for the commemoration of nature and of humanity.  In the preface to
Lyrical Ballads , he wrote: "The principal object, then, which I proposed to
myself in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life
and to relate or describe them throughout, as far as was possible in a
selection of language really used by men." This may appear strange to the
modern reader when considering, for example, I wandered lonely as a cloud,'
perhaps the most famous of Wordsworth's poems. The metaphors he uses may not
sound as if they relate to the voice of the common man, yet this poem
illustrates the second half of his inspiration, celebration of nature, in a
very personal manner.

William Wordsworth was a strange mixture of realist and idealist. Although his
life-philosophy was based upon a deep love for nature and for the common man,
he himself came from more affluent society, and considered himself superior to
those he romanticised, describing a poet as: "A man . . .  endued with more
lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge
of human nature and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common
among mankind."  In spite of this, it was his greatest ambition to be simply:
"A man speaking to men."

In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson, with whom he had five children (two died in
infancy and one later in life).  His brother John was killed in 1804.  In spite
of his natural emotional distress, Wordsworth remained a prolific writer. More
than any other poet, he illustrated the nature of the early English Romantic
Movement.  The date usually given to the origin of the movement is 1798, the
same year that Wordsworth and Coleridge completed their first edition of
Lyrical Ballads .  The Romantic Movement was characterised by revolution -
political and poetical: Through his poetry, Wordsworth responded to the changes
taking place in his society - namely, the repressive measures introduced by the
English government in response to the Revolution in France.

He stood at the forefront of English intellectuals who supported the French
Revolution and felt that it represented a shift in the power balance towards
the working classes, and would therefore be desirable in England. He reacted
strongly against the move away from rural life towards the greater urbanisation
of the population believing that uniformity of industrial occupation and the
desire for more technical information were killing off the finer instincts
found in mankind - the purer feelings characterised by a rural idyll.

In 1835 his sister Dorothy had a complete mental breakdown, from which she
never recovered.  This seemed to mark a turning point in his life.  He lost
much of his radicalism, and conformed more and more with the social position he
occupied, rather than with his youthful ideals. In 1843 he became poet
Laureate.  Two years later he attended the Queen's Ball in London.  Both of
these actions were considered by the second generation romantic poets - Keats,
Shelley and Byron, as a betrayal of what the Romantic movement stood for. On
the 23 April 1850, at the age of 80, Wordsworth died.

By using the imagery of nature, Wordsworth had striven to rediscover something
that he felt his generation had lost.  He believed: "Poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings: It takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquillity".

As he grew older, however, his emotions and passions had mellowed and his verse
grew more akin to that he had earlier rejected. Even his earlier poetry was not
seen by everyone as being merit-worthy.  Due to the originality of its form and
content, Wordsworth's contribution to literature was not always recognised.
Hazlitt, a contemporary writer and critic, said of his poems in 1825: "The
vulgar do not read them: the learned . . . do not understand them, the great
despise [and] the fashionable . . . ridicule them."

Today, Wordsworth's enormous contribution to poetry is generally recognised.
His work may appear rhetorical and artificial by modern standards - after all
it is two hundred years old - but he created the potential for a true form of
poetry for the people.  A poetry that can be used as a common language of
emotion and perception and that does not depend upon education or social
status, either for creation or comprehension.