Biography
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Biography
born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in
the Lake District of northwestern
England on April 7, 1770
orphaned at an early age
entered St. James College,
Cambridge In 1787
received a degree without honors in
1791
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Biography
In 1795, Wordsworth settled with his sister
Dorothy in a cottage at Racedown, Dorset.
In 1798 , Lyrical Ballads was published.
In 1813, he was appointed stampdistributor for Westmoreland .
In 1843, he became Poet Laureate of
England.
died in 1850 at the age of eighty
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Two periods of his poetic career
Early period (more successful)
1. He wrote most of his great poetry
2. His politics were liberal, his religion ambiguous .
3. He had displayed no interest in the church, and his poetry seemed
almost pagan in tone
Second period (decline)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
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In 1793 he had been a revolutionist.
By 1798 his attitude toward France with Napoleon in power
began to change .
By 1802, his political opposition to Napoleon was explicit .
By 1813, when he became stamp-distributor, he was clearly
conservative.
He became a pillar of the Anglican Church
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The Lake District
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His Philosophy
His philosophy of nature
His division of a man’s whole life
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His philosophy of nature
He believed that it was through the permanent
forms of nature that God was revealed to man.
What Wordsworth meant in his philosophy of
nature is not that God is nature, but that nature is
a manifestation of God's creation in its purest,
most uncorrupted form. It is through nature that
man communicates with God, learns about God,
and enjoys the holy and awesome feelings which
are religious feelings. In this sense, “nature” is a
metaphor for God in Wordsworth's poetry, not a
synonym.
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His philosophy of nature
His best poetry is the lofty and
sublime expression of the divine
solace and comfort which he found in
nature.
He believed that the soul, instructed
by the senses and by nature,
transcends both and becomes
assimilated with a divine totality.
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His division of a man’s whole life
Childhood
Youth
Maturity
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Childhood
The awareness of the child is totally sensuous and
unselfconscious. But his experience of the world is
more spiritual than he knows, more unified, and
more joyful because his senses respond to
experience in a pure and innocent way.
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The image of the child
The child is an important figure in Wordsworth's philosophy
and his poetry. He believed in immortality, in the idea that
the soul lives forever. This means that the pure soul exists
before birth as well as after death. During life, the secrets of
the soul are hidden to humans. But the child, because he
has lived for so short a time, is still close to the state of preexistence. His birth into human form has erased from his
conscious memory the pre-life of his soul, but there is still an
unimpaired subconscious memory of eternal bliss, which
allows the child, through his human senses, to respond to
nature and the world with instinctive joy and with the
innocence of a pure soul. The child, then, Wordsworth
believed, has a special kind of wisdom to which men can
turn for instruction. In addition, because childhood
perceptions are remembered in youth and later maturity, the
mature man can use this memory to learn of the continuity of
his own existence. He can acquire a sense of wholeness
within himself and a sense of identification with God.
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Youth
As the child matures into youth, he becomes more selfconscious. The joy is tempered by a sense of loss, and his
perception is no longer unified, but disturbingly dualized. The
youth sees and remembers the things that have once
produced his sense of joy. He still finds pleasure in
experience, but he is conscious of the missing element of joy,
and begins to ask why.
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Maturity
As the youth matures, he develops wisdom. He learns in his
maturity to understand the triple stages of man's life and,
through the wisdom achieved in maturity, he experiences a
new kind of happiness. It is not the unconscious joy of the
child, or the pleasure of awareness which the young man
feels, but the contentment of wisdom of the older man. It is in
the final stage of life that man can re-identify with nature, not
with his senses alone as the child knew it, not with the
conscious pleasure of the youth, but with his soul as only the
mature man can understand it. Wordsworth's later poetry
reflects the contentment and mature wisdom of his
philosophy. It no longer expresses the conflict and
perplexities of a youthful searcher. Because the passion for
life and the conflict which the earlier poetry reflects often do
not appear in the later works, critics have often judged the
“quietism” Wordsworth achieved in his later years as a mark
of “decline.”
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His Works
Lyrical Ballads
Some famous poems
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
The Solitary Reaper
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Lyrical Ballads
The publication in 1798 of this book
marked the “official” opening of the English
Romantic period.
The authors: Wordsworth and Coleridge
The book opened with Coleridge's justly
famous “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
and closed with Wordsworth's now
recognized masterpiece “Lines Composed
a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”
( “Tintern Abbey” ).
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Lyrical Ballads
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In 1800 Wordsworth prepared a second edition,
to which he added a second volume of his
poems.
Wordsworth's Preface was a “defense of the
theory upon which the poems were written.” In
the Preface Wordsworth makes clear the
following points :
Good poetry must speak language “really
spoken by men” and write about the life of
common people in an imaginative way.
Good poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings.”
The objects which excited these emotions were
to be ordinary ones: a tree, a mountain, an old
man and so on.
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Lyrical Ballads
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The style selected for the new poetry was also to be simple.
He avoided the “Personifications of abstract ideas” and the
“poetic diction,” in order to imitate the “the very language of men”.
A poet should give pleasure and reveal universal truth.
Wordsworth believes a poet is “a man speaking to man,” but he
is a more feeling and more sensitive man, one “who rejoices
more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him.”
Wordsworth affirms the Aristotelian classification of poetry as
“the most philosophic of all writing” whose object is not a specific
truth but a “general and operative” truth, and he argues that the
poet is free in all respects but one. He must give pleasure. In
accepting this requirement, the poet indirectly acknowledges “the
beauty of the universe.” He pays homage “to the native and
naked dignity of man” when he agrees to provide the pleasure
through which man acquires knowledge. Thus, in Wordsworth's
opinion, the poet “binds together by passion and knowledge the
vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole
earth, and over all time.”
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Some famous poems
We Are Seven”
“Her Eyes Are Wild”
“Simon Lee”
“Lines Written in Early
Spring”
“To My Sister”
“Expostulation and Reply”
“Tintern Abbey”
The “Lucy Poems”
“Michael”
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“My Heart Leaps Up”
“Resolution and
Independence”
“Westminister Bridge”
“It Is a Beauteous Evening”
“London, 1802”
“The Solitary Reaper”
“I Wandered Lonely as a
Cloud”
“Ode to Duty”
“Ode: Intimations of
Immortality”
“To a Skylark”
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