WORDSWORTH NOTES

 WORDSWORTH

He 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.

Women in 'The Prelude' generally portrayed as slightly more virtuous and patient than men.

Alternative title of The Prelude- "Growth of a poet's mind"

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.

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—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.

Wordsworth's father, although rarely present, taught 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.

After the death of their mother, in 1778, John Wordsworth sent William to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire (now in Cumbria) and Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire; she and William would not meet again for another nine years.

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.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.

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.

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.

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.

With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802 Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, visited Annette and Caroline in Calais.

The purpose of the visit was to pave the way for his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson.

Afterwards he wrote the sonnet "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free" recalling a seaside walk with the 9 year old Caroline he had never seen prior to that visit.

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 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 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 18th-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.

From 1795 to 1797, he wrote his only play, The Borderers, a verse tragedy set during the reign of King Henry III of

England.

Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge 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 1798–99, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in Goslar, and, despite extreme stress and loneliness,

he began work on an autobiographical piece later titled The Prelude.

He 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.

In 1802,Wordsworth 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, three of whom predeceased William and Mary:

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

written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" has been the source of much critical debate.

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.

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.

Some modern critics recognise 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 characterise his early

poetry (loss, death, endurance, separation and abandonment) were resolved in his writings.

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.

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.

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.