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William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850) was a major English romantic
poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English
literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's
masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, an autobiographical poem of
his early years that was revised and expanded a number of times. It was never
published during his lifetime, and was only given the title after his death. Up
until this time it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was
England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
 Early life
and education
The second of five children of John Wordsworth (b. April 7th 1741), William
Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in Cumberland—part of the scenic region in
north-west England called the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist
Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year.
After the death of their mother in 1778, their father sent William to Hawkshead
Grammar School and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She and
William did not meet again for another nine years.
In 1783 his father, who was a lawyer and the solicitor for the Earl of Lonsdale (a
man much despised in the area), died. The estate consisted of around £4500 , most
of it in claims upon the Earl, who thwarted these claims until his death in 1802.
The Earl's successor, however, settled the claims with interest. After their
father's death, the Wordsworth children were left under the guardianship of their
uncles. Although many aspects of his boyhood were positive, he recalled bouts of
loneliness and anxiety. It took him many years, and much writing, to recover from
the death of his parents and his separation from his siblings.
Wordsworth began attending St John's College, Cambridge in 1787, maintained by
relatives. 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 visited Revolutionary France and supported the
Republican movement. The following year, he graduated from Cambridge without
distinction. His youngest brother, Christopher, rose to be Master of Trinity
College.
Relationship
with Annette Vallon
In November 1791, Wordsworth returned to France and took a walking tour of Europe
that included the Alps and Italy. 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. 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. During this period, he wrote his acclaimed "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 also strong suggestions that Wordsworth may have been
depressed and emotionally unsettled in the mid 1790s.
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.
First
publication and Lyrical Ballads
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 also met Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797,
Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, moved to 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 had neither the name of Wordsworth nor
Coleridge 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 author, and
included a preface to the poems, which was significantly augmented in the 1802
edition. This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is considered a central work of Romantic
literary 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 also gives his famous
definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from
emotions recollected in tranquility." A fourth and final edition of Lyrical Ballads
was published in 1805.
Wordsworth hated the poetry of Alexander Pope, believing that it was the antithesis
of his own work; he denied that Pope's work was even poetry, saying that if Pope's
work was poetry, then Wordsworth's was not.
Germany and
move to the Lake District
Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge then travelled to Germany in the autumn of 1798.
While Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the trip, its main effect on
Wordsworth was to produce homesickness. During the harsh winter of 1798–1799,
Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in Goslar, and despite extreme stress and loneliness,
he began work on an autobiographical piece later titled The Prelude. He also wrote
a number of famous poems, including "the Lucy poems". He and his sister moved back
to England, now to Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District, and this time
with fellow poet Robert Southey nearby. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey came to
be known as the "Lake Poets". Through this period, many of his poems revolve around
themes of death, endurance, separation, and grief.
Marriage
In 1802, after returning from his trip to France with Dorothy to visit Annette and
Caroline, Wordsworth received the inheritance owed by Lord Lonsdale since John
Wordsworth's death in 1783. Later that year, he married a childhood friend, Mary
Hutchinson. Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The
following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, John.
Both Coleridge's health and his relationship to Wordsworth began showing signs of
decay in 1804. That year Wordsworth befriended Robert Southey. With Napoleon's rise
as Emperor of the French, Wordsworth's last wisp of liberalism fell, and from then
on he identified himself as a Tory.
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 (1747-1822), 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. 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), where he spent
the rest of his life.
The Poet
Laureate and other honours
Wordsworth received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from Durham
University, and the same honour from Oxford University the next year. 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. When his
daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry came to a standstill.
Death
William Wordsworth died in Rydal Mount in 1850 and was buried at St. Oswald's
church in Grasmere. His widow 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 recognised as his
masterpiece. The lives of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in particular their
collaboration on the "Lyrical Ballads," are discussed in the 2000 film
Pandaemonium.
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William
Wordsworth - Manifesting Generator - Biography
