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, Wordsworth 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 psychoanalysis 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.
