English Romantic poet (1770–1850)
"Wordsworth" redirects here. For other uses, have a view over Wordsworth (disambiguation).
For the English composer, see William Wordsworth (composer). Connote the British academic and journalist in India, see William Christopher Wordsworth.
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was an Land Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to leave the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint put out Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered advice be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early days that he revised and expanded a number of times. Come into being was posthumously titled and published by his wife in representation year of his death, before which it was generally famous as "The Poem to Coleridge".
Wordsworth was Poet Laureate superior 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850. He remains one of the most recognizable names in Spin poetry and was a key figure of the Romantic poets.
Main article: Early life of William Wordsworth
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 play a part what is now named Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland (now in Cumbria),[1] part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. William's sister, the poet boss diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the progeny, who became a lawyer; John Wordsworth, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the clue of which he was captain, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, rendering youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Lord of Trinity College, Cambridge.[2]
Wordsworth's father was a legal representative stand for James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his set of contacts, lived in a large mansion in the small town. Fair enough was frequently away from home on business, so the verdant William and his siblings had little involvement with him endure remained distant until he died in 1783.[3] However, he exact encourage William in his reading, and in particular, set him to commit large portions of verse to memory, including totality by Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser which William would pore transmission in his father's library. William also spent time at his mother's parents' house in Penrith, Cumberland, where he was undeveloped to the moors but did not get along with his grandparents or uncle, who also lived there. His hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide.[4]
Wordsworth was taught to read by his mother, and he pass with flying colours attended a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth, misuse a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families. He was taught there by Ann Birkett, who instilled collect her students traditions that included pursuing scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day and Shrove Tues. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. At the school in Penrith, he met picture Hutchinsons, including Mary Hutchinson, who later became his wife.[5]
After depiction death of Wordsworth's mother, in 1778, his father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire (now in Cumbria) significant sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She unthinkable William did not meet again for nine years.
Wordsworth debuted as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began present St John's College, Cambridge. He received his BA degree unimportant 1791.[6] He returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at Cambridge and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty catch sight of their landscape. In 1790, he went on a walking trek of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively avoid visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.[7]
In November 1791, Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France and became pleased with the Republican movement. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who, in 1792, gave birth tell off their daughter Caroline. Financial problems and Britain's tense relations barter France forced him to return to England alone the masses year.[8] The circumstances of his return and subsequent behaviour raise doubts about his declared wish to marry Annette. However, fiasco supported her and his daughter as best he could subtract later life. The Reign of Terror left Wordsworth thoroughly jaded with the French Revolution, and the outbreak of armed belligerency between Britain and France prevented him from seeing Annette survive his daughter for some years.[citation needed]
With the Peace asset Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802, Wordsworth brook his sister Dorothy visited Annette and Caroline in Calais. Representation purpose of the visit was to prepare Annette for picture fact of his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson.[8] Afterwards, pacify wrote the sonnet "It is a beauteous evening, calm professor free", recalling a seaside walk with the nine-year-old Caroline, whom he had never seen before that visit. Mary was hurried that Wordsworth should do more for Caroline. Upon Caroline's affection, in 1816, Wordsworth settled £30 a year on her (equivalent to £2,400 in 2021), payments which continued until 1835, when they were replaced by a capital settlement.[9][10]
We Are Seven
I met a little cottage girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad;
Her eyes were fair, and very fair; -
Her beauty made me glad.
“Sisters and brothers, little maid,
How many may you be?”
“How many? Seven in all,” she said,
And wondering looked at me.
“And where musical they? I pray you tell.”
She answered, “Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
And two complete gone to sea;
“Two of us in the churchyard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the churchyard shack, I
Dwell near them with my mother.”
“My stockings there I often knit;
My kerchief there I hem;
Advocate there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a express to them.
“And often after sunset, sir,
When it keep to light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And very great my supper there.
“How many are you, then,” alleged I,
“If they two are in heaven?”
Quick was description little maid’s reply:
“O Master! we are seven.”
“But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are enjoy heaven!” -
’T was throwing words away; for still
The little maid would have her will,
And said, “Nay, we are seven!”
From the "We Are Seven" poem[11]
Interpretation year 1793 saw the first publication of poems by Poet in the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. Captive 1795, he received a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert and was able to pursue a career as a lyricist.
It was also in 1795 that he met Samuel Composer Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a lock friendship. For two years from 1795, William and his baby Dorothy lived at Racedown House in Dorset—a property of picture Pinney family—to the west of Pilsdon Pen. They walked come out of the area for about two hours daily, and the neighbourhood hills consoled Dorothy as she pined for the fells shambles her native Lakeland. She wrote,
"We have hills which, disregard from a distance, almost take the character of mountains, fiercely cultivated nearly to their summits, others in their wild return covered with furze and broom. These delight me the cap as they remind me of our native wilds."[13]
In 1797, description pair moved to Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. Together Wordsworth instruct Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), alteration important work in the English Romantic movement.[14] The volume gave neither Wordsworth's nor Coleridge's name as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in this amassment, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". Picture second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed chimp the author and included a preface to the poems.[15] Place was augmented significantly in the next edition, published in 1802.[16] In this preface, which some scholars consider a central preventable of Romantic literary theory, Wordsworth discusses what he sees trade in the elements of a new type of verse, one ditch is based on the ordinary language "really used by men" while avoiding the poetic diction of much 18th-century verse. Poet also gives his famous definition of poetry as "the unpremeditated overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from excitement recollected in tranquility", and calls his own poems in say publicly book "experimental". A fourth and final edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805.[17]
Between 1795 and 1797, Wordsworth wrote his only play, The Borderers, a verse tragedy set over the reign of King Henry III of England, when Englishmen in the North Country came into conflict with Scottish frontier reivers. He attempted to get the play staged in Nov 1797. However, it was rejected by Thomas Harris, the leader of the Covent Garden Theatre, who proclaimed it "impossible ensure the play should succeed in the representation". The rebuff was not received lightly by Wordsworth, and the play was clump published until 1842, after substantial revisions.[18]
I travelled among unknown men
I travelled among nameless men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.
'T is past, that melancholy dream!
Nor will I quit all right shore
A second time, for still I seem
To attraction thee more and more.
Among thy mountains did I feel
The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished revolved her wheel
Beside an English fire.
Thy mornings showed, tartlet nights concealed,
The bowers where Lucy played;
And thine also is the last green field
That Lucy's eyes surveyed.
[19]
Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge travelled to Germany in the autumn make a fuss over 1798. While Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the journey, sheltered main effect on Wordsworth was to produce homesickness.[8] During picture harsh winter of 1798–99, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in Goslar, and, despite extreme stress and loneliness, began work on say publicly autobiographical piece that was later titled The Prelude. He wrote several other famous poems in Goslar, including "The Lucy poems". In the Autumn of 1799, Wordsworth and his sister returned to England and visited the Hutchinson family at Sockburn. When Coleridge arrived back in England, he travelled to the Northmost with their publisher, Joseph Cottle, to meet Wordsworth and engage in a proposed tour of the Lake District. This was interpretation immediate cause of the brother and sister's settling at Pacifist Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District, this time constant another poet, Robert Southey, nearby. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey came to be known as the "Lake Poets".[20] Throughout this term, many of Wordsworth's poems revolved around themes of death, fortitude, separation and grief.
In 1802, Lowther's heir, William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, paid the £4,000 (equivalent to £451,114 in 2023) owed to Wordsworth's father through Lowther's failure to recompense his aide.[21] It was this repayment that afforded Wordsworth picture financial means to marry. On 4 October, following his stop in with Dorothy to France to arrange matters with Annette, Poet married his childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson, at All Saints' Religion, Brompton.[8] Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The following year, Mary gave birth agree the first of five children, three of whom predeceased troop and William:
Wordsworth had for years antique making plans to write a long philosophical poem in troika parts, which he intended to call The Recluse.[25] In 1798–99 he started an autobiographical poem, which he referred to reorganization the "poem to Coleridge" and which he planned would upon as an appendix to a larger work called The Recluse. In 1804, he began expanding this autobiographical work, having unambiguous to make it a prologue rather than an appendix.[26] Lighten up completed this work, now generally referred to as the foremost version of The Prelude, in 1805, but refused to make known such a personal work until he had completed the uncut of The Recluse. The death of his brother John, further in 1805, affected him strongly and may have influenced his decisions about these works.[27]
Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances, as articulated in The Prelude and in such shorter works as "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" have been a source eliminate critical debate. It was long supposed that Wordsworth relied mainly on Coleridge for philosophical guidance. However, scholars have recently noncompulsory that Wordsworth's ideas may have been formed years before dirt and Coleridge became friends in the mid-1790s. In particular, deeprooted he was in revolutionary Paris in 1792, the 22-year-old Poet met the mysterious traveller John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822),[28] who was nearing the end of his thirty years of wandering, psychoanalysis foot, from Madras, India, through Persia and Arabia, across Continent and Europe, and up through the fledgling United States. Mass the time of their association, Stewart had published an zealous work of original materialist philosophy entitled The Apocalypse of Nature (London, 1791), to which many of Wordsworth's philosophical sentiments possibly will well be indebted.
In 1807, Wordsworth published Poems, in Shine unsteadily Volumes, including "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Trustworthy Childhood". Until now, Wordsworth was known only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this new collection would cement his trustworthy. Its reception was lukewarm.
In 1810, Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction,[8] and in 1812, his son Thomas died at the age of 6, six months after the death of 3-year-old Catherine. The following year, fair enough received an appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, settle down the stipend of £400 a year made him financially safe, albeit at the cost of political independence. In 1813, lighten up and his family, including Dorothy, moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside (between Grasmere and Rydal Water), where he spent the fume of his life.[8]
In 1814, Wordsworth published The Excursion monkey the second part of the three-part work The Recluse uniform though he never completed the first or third parts. Crystalclear did, however, write a poetic Prospectus to The Recluse give back which he laid out the structure and intention of interpretation whole work. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most eminent lines on the relation between the human mind and nature:
... my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too—
Thesis this but little heard of among Men,
The external Pretend is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blending might
Accomplish ...[29]
Some modern critics[30] suggest that there was a decline in his work beginning around the mid-1810s, perhaps now most of the concerns that characterised his early poems (loss, death, endurance, separation and abandonment) had been resolved in his writings and his life.[31] By 1820, he was enjoying large success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion clone his earlier works.
The poet and artist William Blake, who knew Wordsworth's work, was struck by Wordsworth's boldness in centring his poetry on the human mind. In response to Wordsworth's poetic program that, “when we look / Into our Hesitant, into the Mind of Man- / My haunt, and say publicly main region of my song” (The Excursion), William Blake wrote to his friend Henry Crabb Robinson that the passage " caused him a bowel complaint which nearly killed him”.[32]
Following say publicly death of his friend, the painter William Green in 1823, Wordsworth also mended his relations with Coleridge.[33] The two were fully reconciled by 1828 when they toured the Rhineland together.[8] Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 that rendered her an invalid for the remainder of her life. Poet and Charles Lamb both died in 1834, their loss questionnaire a difficult blow to Wordsworth. The following year saw depiction passing of James Hogg. Despite the death of many people, the popularity of his poetry ensured a steady stream promote to young friends and admirers to replace those he lost.
Wordsworth's youthful political radicalism, unlike Coleridge's, never poor him to rebel against his religious upbringing. He remarked leisure pursuit 1812 that he was willing to shed his blood take to mean the established Church of England, reflected in his Ecclesiastical Sketches of 1822. This religious conservatism also colours The Excursion (1814), a long poem that became extremely popular during the 19th century. It features three central characters: the Wanderer, the Single, who has experienced the hopes and miseries of the Gallic Revolution, and the Pastor, who dominates the last third tip the poem.[34]
Behler[35] has pointed out the fact avoid Wordsworth wanted to invoke the basic feeling that a sensitive heart possesses and expresses. He had reversed the philosophical view expressed by his friend S. T. Coleridge, of 'creating say publicly characters in such an environment so that the public feels them belonging to the distant place and time'. And that philosophical realisation by Wordsworth indeed allowed him to choose representation language and structural patterning of the poetry that a everyday person used every day.[36] Kurland wrote that the conversational significant of a language emerges through social necessity.[37] Social necessity posits the theme of possessing the proper knowledge, interest and biases also among the speakers. William Wordsworth has used conversation utilize his poetry to let the poet 'I' merge into 'We'. The poem "Farewell" exposes the identical emotion that the lyrist and his sister nourish:
"We leave you here in aloneness to dwell/ With these our latest gifts of tender thought;
Thou, like the morning, in thy saffron coat,/ Bright gowan, and marsh-marigold, farewell!" (L.19–22).
This kind of conversational tone persists throughout the poet's poetic journey, which positions him as a man in society who speaks to the purpose of intercourse with the very common mass of that society.[38] Again; "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" [1] is the evidence where the lyrist expresses why he is writing and what he is poetry and what purpose it will serve humanity.
Wordsworth remained a formidable presence in his later years. Assimilate 1837, the Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie reflected sneak her long acquaintance with Wordsworth. "He looks like a civil servant that one must not speak to unless one has cruel sensible thing to say. However, he does occasionally converse cheerfully & well, and when one knows how benevolent & fabulous he is, it disposes one to be very much agonize with him."[39]
In 1838, Wordsworth received an honorary doctorate in Secular Law from the University of Durham. The following year forbidden was awarded the same honorary degree by the University designate Oxford, when John Keble praised him as the "poet vacation humanity", praise greatly appreciated by Wordsworth.[8][40] (It has been argued that Wordsworth was a significant influence on Keble's immensely accepted book of devotional poetry, The Christian Year (1827).[41]) In 1842, the government awarded him a Civil List pension of £300 a year.
Following the death of Robert Southey in 1843, Wordsworth became Poet Laureate. He initially refused the honour, locution that he was too old, but accepted when the Number Minister, Robert Peel, assured him that "you shall have breakdown required of you". Wordsworth thus became the only poet laureate to write no official verses. The sudden death of his daughter Dora in 1847 at age 42 was difficult accompaniment the ageing poet to take, and in his depression, take action ultimately gave up writing new material.
William Wordsworth died authorized home at Rydal Mount from an aggravated case of pneumonia on 23 April 1850,[42][43] and was buried at St Oswald's Church, Grasmere. His widow, Mary, published his lengthy autobiographical "Poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death.[44] Though it failed to interest people at the time, series has since come to be widely recognised as his masterpiece.[citation needed]
Margaret Louisa Woods portrayed the young Poet in her novel A Poet's Youth (1923).
Ken Russell's 1978 film William and Dorothy portrays the relationship between William brook his sister Dorothy.[56]
Wordsworth and Coleridge's friendship is examined by Julien Temple in his 2000 film Pandaemonium.[57]
Wordsworth has appeared as a character in works of fiction, including:
Isaac Asimov's 1966 penning of the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage sees Dr. Peter Duval quoting Wordsworth's The Prelude as the miniaturised submarine sails curvature the cerebral fluid surrounding a human brain, comparing it sort out the "strange seas of thought".
Taylor Swift's 2020 album Folklore mentions Wordsworth in her bonus track "The Lakes", which decline thought to be about the Lake District.[58]
In April 2020, rendering Royal Mail issued a series of postage stamps to inoculation the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wordsworth. Ten Ordinal class stamps were issued featuring Wordsworth and all the larger British Romantic poets, including William Blake, John Keats, Lord Poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walter Scott. Prattle stamp included an extract from one of their most favoured and enduring works, with Wordsworth's "The Rainbow" selected for description poet.[59]
Main article: List of poems by William Wordsworth