WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 1770 - 1850

(G3a, G3b, G3c, G4, W4, Va)

Acknowledgements

Wordsworth: detail, by the English painter Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846), 1842 – National Portrait Gallery, London. Tintern Abbey by the English painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) – Tate Gallery, London. Dove Cottage: by the English illustrator Ernest William Haslehust (1866-1949). Rydal Mount: engraving by the English artist William Green (1760-1823), published in Thirty Six Etchings from Nature, Ambleside 1821. Daffodils, Ulswater – Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, English Lake District. Industry: date and artist unknown. Dorothy: lithograph, date and artist unknown – private collection. The Wanderer: by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), 1818 - Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Nightmare: by the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) – Tate Britain, London. Moonrise: by the German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), 1822 – Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

xxxxxAs we have seen, in 1789 (G3b) the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth collaborated with his fellow poet and countryman Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the production of the Lyrical Ballads. This work, which included Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, is generally taken to mark the beginning of the Romantic Movement in English poetry. Later, in 1807, Wordsworth published his own collection of Poems, and this included his Ode, Intimations of Immortality, a thought-provoking work.

xxxxxWordsworth was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland, and it was here in the Lake District that he developed a deep love of nature, and came to appreciate the simple life of country people. Left an orphan at the age of 13, he attended Hawkshead grammar school as from 1778, and then studied at Saint John's College, Cambridge. After graduating, he paid a second visit to France and this proved productive in more ways than one. He became inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, then in its early stages, and he also fell in love with Annette Vallon - by whom he had an illegitimate daughter named Caroline. Religious differences and a plain lack of money stood in the way of marriage, so he returned to England alone in December 1792. Because of the Revolutionary Wars he was not able to visit France until 1802 and by then his daughter was nine years old.

 

xxxxxThe next few years were troubled ones for the young Wordsworth. Virtually without money and with no trade to hand, he roamed aimlessly around London, opposing the war against France and wracked with guilt over the woman and child he had deserted. His first attempt at writing, The Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches (about a walking holiday in the Alps) was published in 1793. They were not without merit but, being in the formal style of the day, they received little attention, and only a few copies were sold. Nonetheless, two years later, having received a legacy of £900 from a close friend, he decided to devote himself to poetry. There followed his tragedy, The Borderers, and the poems Salisbury Plain and The Ruined Cottage, works of social protest which echoed his pessimistic mood at that time.

xxxxxThen in 1797 all changed for the better. He was reunited with his beloved sister, Dorothy, and, after a short stay in Dorset, they moved to Alfoxden in Somerset, near to Coleridge’s home in Nether Stowey. As we have seen, this move proved the making of Wordsworth. It marked the beginning of a close friendship between the two poets, and in 1798 resulted in their joint production of a book of poems entitled The Lyrical Ballads, a work which was to usher in the Romantic Movement and change the face of English poetry.

xxxxxThis collection of Lyrical Ballads was nothing short of an open revolt against the artificial, stilted style of Neoclassical verse. It attracted some severe criticism from the conformists, but it was a success nonetheless. On the strength of it, Wordsworth, his sister and Coleridge spent the winter of 1798/1799 in Germany, and it was here that Wordsworth produced some of his finest lyrical verses, including the elegies Lucy and Matthew and the opening draft of his The Prelude, a work of reminiscence similar to that of Tintern Abbey (illustrated). This long poem, completed in 1805 and frequently revised, contained some of his finest poetry.

xxxxxOn their return in 1799 they were on the move again. This time they settled in Dove Cottage in Grasmere (illustrated), and the next eight years saw a continuation of his outstanding compositions, concluding with his Poems in Two Volumes of 1807. Apart from several of his well-known sonnets, this collection contained the autobiographical poem Resolution and Independence, his Ode to Duty, and his remarkable Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. The last-named developed the themes earlier at work in his Tintern Abbey. In it he regretted the loss of his childhood together with that spiritual knowledge, that “celestial light” with which - as Plato would have it - a child is born. This knowledge, Wordsworth maintained, could only be regained by recalling those radiant days of one’s youth. And these years saw his marriage to Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, in 1802, and a visit to Scotland where he met and became friendly with the novelist Walter Scott.

xxxxxThe year 1807 or thereabouts marked the end of his most creative years. By 1812, deeply saddened and shocked by the death of his brother John, and then two of his own children, he came to adopt a more sober, restrained style, much removed from the romantic and revolutionary zeal of his earlier days and the free rein it gave to his imagination. Furthermore, disappointed and disillusioned by the turn of events in France, and influenced no doubt by the opinions of his close friends - particularly Walter Scott - his views became more conservative, and his writing more in keeping with what were then seen as acceptable standards.

xxxxxIn 1813 he secured a job distributing stamps in the county of Westmorland, and in the same year he and his family made their last move, this time to a larger, imposing house at Rydal Mount near Ambleside (illustrated). Here he continued to write, but he also published a number of earlier works at this juncture - such as Peter Bell and The Waggoner - and he spent some time travelling abroad. Notable works during his later years were The Excursion (the second part of his ambitious project The Recluse), The River Duddon, his Ecclesiastical Sonnets of 1822, (satirical observations on church history) and Yarrow Revisited and Other Poems in 1835. In 1843 he succeeded his friend Robert Southey as Poet Laureate, but his final years were marred by his sister’s illness, and the death of his daughter Dora in 1847. He died in April 1850 and was buried in Grasmere churchyard.

 

xxxxxWordsworth’s early verse - and some produced later - was a blatant rejection of the high-flown and structured poetry of his day, and the intellectual, artificial content by which it sought to impress. In his preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800, he firmly laid down his poetic principles, maintaining that the subject matter of poetry and the language in which it was told should be confined within the experience and the understanding of ordinary people. He turned his attention, and that of his readers, to the beauty of nature and the scenes of “low and rustic life”, and he described them in words that, whilst common-place in themselves, were made memorable by the beauty and sensitivity of his verse. Poetry, he argued, stemmed from “emotion recollected in tranquility”, and he illustrated this in lyrics such as Daffodils, The Solitary Reaper, To the Cuckoo and Upon Westminster Bridge. Such verse recaptured the experience of the senses, and to him that was what poetry was all about. This highly romantic, unconventional approach in no way pleased the critics, and it took some time to bring about change, but by the early 1830s the simplicity of subject and language, the beauty and grace of the lyrics, and the powerful appeal to the senses - timely evident again in his The River Duddon of 1820 - had firmly established Romanticism as the current literary movement.

xxxxxBut as we have seen, Wordsworth’s poetry was not simply intended to awaken his reader to the beauty of nature, though this it undoubtedly achieved. Much of his work went deeper than that. He saw himself as a philosophical poet. He considered that by communicating with nature through the senses one could find God, and come to understand the meaning of life itself. If one listened, one was able to hear in nature the “still, sad music of humanity” because nature was wedded to the soul of mankind. And it was to provide an introspective account of his own thought processes from the days of childhood - a spiritual autobiography in verse - that he wrote The Prelude and then The Excursion. These were seen as parts of that longer, ambitious work which Coleridge had encouraged Wordsworth to begin back in the 1790s. Entitled The Recluse, it was intended to be a philosophical poem on the nature of man, science and society, but it was never completed. Nevertheless, The Prelude, aptly sub-titled “The Growth of a Poet’s Mind”, traces his life from his school days to 1799, when he settled at Grasmere, concentrating above all on the growth of his imagination, and its increasing power over both reason and the senses. Likewise The Excursion, completed in 1814, was made up of nine philosophical monologues and included his earlier poem The Ruined Cottage - one of his finest pieces in blank verse - concerning the fate of a woman whose husband goes off to war and never returns. And another poem in this collection was Outrage Done to Nature, in which he deplores the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon the countryside (illustrated).

xxxxxWordworth’s major poems are among the finest in English literature, loved above all for their use of simple words, their description of commonplace things and events, and the beauty of their verse. His poetic theories, put into practice, created a new tradition, and made him one of the foremost leaders of the Romantic Movement. Apart from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and Walter Scott, his friends included the writers Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt and De Quincey.

xxxxxIncidentally, Wordsworth owed much to his sister Dorothy (1771-1855), and his wife Mary. Dorothy Wordsworth in particular gave him a great deal of advice and encouragement in his work (illustrated). Her journals, written while they were living at Alfoxden (1798) and Grasmere (1800-03), provide an interesting record of their life and travels together, and they were attractively and sensitively written. She suffered from a progressive mental disorder over the last twenty years of her life, and this greatly upset her brother. Mary (1770-1859), whom Wordsworth married in 1802, was the subject of the poem which begins “She was a phantom of delight, When first she gleam’d upon my sight….” They had three sons and two daughters. ……

xxxxx…… Below are extracts from just five of his poems:

xxxxxThe aesthetic movement known as Romanticism was a reaction against the strictures of 18th century classicism, with its emphasis on reason, artificial traditions, restraints on form and subject matter, and its intellectual, logical approach - nurtured by the Age of Enlightenment. The term was derived from those medieval “romances” which, in their own time, had broken the literary mould by their exaggerated sentiment and their fanciful, larger-than-life adventures. This resort to fantasy was the very essence of romanticism.

xxxxxBut the Romantic Movement that spanned from the beginning of the French Revolution to the early days of the Victorian Era (the 1840s) also brought about widespread changes in style and attitudes. It did not rely on the senses - accepting things as they actually appeared - but laid stress upon the workings of intuition and imagination, and this opened up a vast new field of exploration in all the arts. Now interest was to centre on the irrational and the exceptional, not on the norm and the ordinary. This “awakening” included a fascination with death, the supernatural and the exotic; a mystical harmony with the world of nature; and a striving for the political ideal - freedom for the individual. Now personal feelings were to be plumbed, the emotions of passionate love poured out, and nostalgia felt for the hero figure of the past and all things primitive. Illustrated here is the imaginative work of the German artist Caspar David Friedrich, entitled The Wanderer above the Mists.

xxxxxIn Romantic literature, nowhere was this change more dramatic than in the field of English poetry. Here it was not a reaction against Neoclassicism but a revolt. As we have seen, William Wordsworth produced his poetic manifesto in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1800, defining the principles of the English romantic movement in black and white. Poetry, he maintained, was a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. He himself exemplified this “new look” by his profound love of nature, expressed in his beautiful sonnets, whilst Coleridge, the co-author of the Lyrical Ballads, dwelt upon the exotic and the mysterious, as in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner and his Kubla Khan.

 

xxxxxBut though the Lyrical Ballads launched the romantic movement in Britain, it was by no means the start of this literary revolution. The English poet James Thomson, for example, had shown a deep love of nature in his Seasons as early as 1730, and this theme had been central to the works of William Cowper and Robbie Burns in the 1780s. In the meantime Oliver Goldsmith, in his Deserted Village, had revealed his deep concern for the plight of the working classes, and Thomas Gray had shown a melancholy interest in death in his famous Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Later the poet and artist William Blake created a visionary world in writing as well as in art with his Songs of Innocence of 1794. And romanticism was on the move in Germany as from the mid-1770s. Here the Sturm und Drang movement, led by such heavyweights as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schiller, was full of extravagant passions.

xxxxxContemporary with Wordsworth and Coleridge, and contributing to this romantic movement, were a number of literary giants. Walter Scott produced a series of narrative poems set in what he saw as the halcyon days of the Middle Ages; Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of transcendent love in his Prometheus Unbound, produced in 1820, and John Keats, in his moving poems of this time, often dwelt a great deal upon death, suffering and decay. And Lord Byron made a contribution with his anti-hero Don Juan, not to mention his own turbulent life. Regarding the prose writers of these days, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt stand out for their critical works, and Thomas De Quincey for his colourful autobiography Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

xxxxxIn France - mainly because of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars - the full force of the romantic movement was not felt until later in the century, with the works of poets like Alfonse de Lamartine and Alfred de Musset, and writers such as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and George Sand, whilst in the United States the major contributors in this same period were Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In England by this time - the mid -19th century - the movement had begun to wane, though, given time, it did reoccur in various forms. In the Victorian Era, social, political and industrial development tended to dominate the agenda, turning the majority of writers to subjects such as education, the plight of the working classes, the place of religion, and the need for political reform. In an age of materialism, it was a time for realism rather than romanticism.

xxxxxThe romantic movement was not confined, of course, to literature. It was at work at this time in both art and music - though not always with the same degree of definition. In Romantic art, for example, the English artist William Blake, together with his friend Henry Fuseli, introduced bizarre and frightening pictures, and these were to be followed by epic scenes of catastrophe by J.M.W. Turner, contrasting with the peaceful landscapes of John Constable. In France, as we shall see (1818), the movement was championed by Théodore Géricault - famous for his Raft of the Medusa - and the imaginative works of Eugène Delacroix, whilstxin Germany Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), a quiet, introspective man, produced mystic landscapes and moonlit seas with deep inner meaning, seen at best in The Cross in the Mountains of 1808, The Wanderer above the Mists of 1818 (illustrated above), Moonrise over the Sea of 1822 (illustrated here), and Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon of 1835. The movement later spawned the Barbizon School in France, and the Pre-Raphaelites in England, and paved the way for Impressionism and Symbolism.

xxxxxIn Romantic music, in addition to its settings for the romantic literary themes of poems, dramas and novels, the movement was mainly characterized by an intensity of feeling, a profound love of nature, and the themes of idealism and nationalism. Among the first romantics were Weber and Schubert, and these were followed by an array of talent which included Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Chopin, Glinka, Liszt, Schumann, Verdi and Wagner. Most of these produced their major works in the first 25 years of Queen Victoria’s reign (Va), but later composers were to take the movement almost to the end of the 19th century.

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