Context
William Wordsworth was born on April 7th, 1770, in Cockermouth,
Cumberland, England. Young William's parents, John and Ann, died during
his boyhood. Raised amid the mountains of Cumberland alongside the River
Derwent, Wordworth grew up in a rustic society, and spent a great deal of
his time playing outdoors, in what he would later remember as a pure
communion with nature. In the early 1790s William lived for a time in
France, then in the grip of the violent
Revolution; Wordsworth's philosophical
sympathies lay with the revolutionaries, but his loyalties lay with
England, whose monarchy he was not prepared to see overthrown. While in
France, Wordsworth had a long affair with Annette Vallon, with whom he had
a daughter, Caroline. A later journey to France to meet Caroline, now a
young girl, would inspire the great sonnet "It is a beauteous evening,
calm and free."
The chaos and bloodshed of the Reign of Terror in Paris drove William to
philosophy books; he was deeply troubled by the rationalism he found in
the works of thinkers such as William Godwin, which clashed with his own
softer, more emotional understanding of the world. In despair, he gave up
his pursuit of moral questions. In the mid-1790s, however, Wordsworth's
increasing sense of anguish forced him to formulate his own understanding
of the world and of the human mind in more concrete terms. The theory he
produced, and the poetics he invented to embody it, caused a revolution in
English literature.
Developed throughout his life, Wordsworth's understanding of the human
mind seems simple enough today, what with the advent of psycholanalysis
and the general Freudian acceptance of the importance of childhood in the
adult psyche. But in Wordsworth's time, in what Seamus Heaney has called
"Dr. Johnson's supremely adult eighteenth century," it was shockingly
unlike anything that had been proposed before. Wordsworth believed (as he
expressed in poems such as the "Intimations of Immortality" Ode) that,
upon being born, human beings move from a perfect, idealized realm into
the imperfect, un-ideal earth. As children, some memory of the former
purity and glory in which they lived remains, best perceived in
the solemn and joyous relationship of the child to the beauties of nature.
But as children grow older, the memory fades, and the magic of nature dies.
Still, the memory of childhood can offer an important solace,
which brings with it almost a kind of re-access to the lost purities of
the past. And the maturing mind develops the capability to understand
nature in human terms, and to see in it metaphors for human life,
which compensate for the loss of the direct connection.
Freed from financial worries by a legacy left to him in 1795, Wordsworth
moved with his sister Dorothy to Racedown, and then to Alfoxden in
Grasmere, where Wordsworth could be closer to his friend and fellow poet
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Together, Wordsworth and
Coleridge began work on a book called Lyrical Ballads, first
published in 1798 and reissued with Wordsworth's monumental preface in
1802.
The publication of Lyrical Ballads represents a landmark moment for
English poetry; it was unlike anything that had come before, and paved the
way for everything that has come after. According to the theory that
poetry resulted from the "spontaneous overflow" of emotions, as Wordsworth
wrote in the preface, Wordsworth and Coleridge made it their task to write
in the simple language of common people, telling concrete stories of their
lives. According to this theory, poetry originated in "emotion recollected
in a state of tranquility"; the poet then surrendered to the emotion, so
that the
tranquility dissolved, and the emotion remained in the poem. This explicit
emphasis on feeling, simplicity, and the pleasure of beauty over rhetoric,
ornament, and formality changed the course of English poetry, replacing
the elaborate classical forms of Pope and Dryden with a new Romantic
sensibility. Wordsworth's most important legacy, besides his lovely,
timeless poems, is his launching of the Romantic era, opening the gates
for later writers such as John Keats, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, and Lord Byron in England, and Emerson and
Thoreau in America.
Following the success of Lyrical Ballads and his subsequent poem
The Prelude, a massive autobiography in verse form, Wordsworth
moved to the stately house at Rydal Mount where he lived, with Dorothy,
his wife Mary, and his children, until his death in 1850. Wordsworth
became the dominant force in English poetry while still quite a young man,
and he lived to be quite old; his later years were marked by an increasing
aristocratic temperament and a general alienation from the younger
Romantics whose work he had inspired. Byron--the only important poet to
become more popular than Wordsworth during Wordsworth's lifetime--in
particular saw him as a kind of sell-out, writing in his sardonic preface
to Don Juan that the once-liberal Wordsworth had "turned out a
Tory" at last. The last decades of Wordsworth's life, however, were spent
as Poet Laureate of England, and until his death he was widely considered
the most important author in England.
