William Wordsworth
Early life and education
• Born in West Cumberland in 1770
• After attending a local grammar school, he proceeded to Cambridge where he graduated without distinction in 1791
• He attracted by the democratic ideals of the French revolution, he moved to
France.
• He had love affair with Annette Vallon, but lack of financial means prevented
him from marrying her , and he returned
England
Annette VALLON
• In conjunction with his friend and literary
companion, Coleridge , published the highly
polemical yet influential collection of poetry Lyrical Ballads (1798)
• In 1799 Wordsworth
returned to settle in the Lake District with Dorothy and Coleridge
• In the Lyrical Ballads which is the actual declaration of Romanticism, Wordsworth expresses the love of
nature.
• Additions to the Lyrical Ballads in 1799 were
followed by the first draft of his lengthy
autobiographical poem, The Prelude , six years later.
First publication and Lyrical Ballads
• 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. That year, he met Samual Taylor Coleridge in Somerset.
• The two poets quickly developed a close
friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister,
Dorothy, moved to Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey.
Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads, an
important work in the English Romantic movement
• Wordsworth's ideas concerning nature , the task of the poet and the nature of poetical composition have become a landmark in the history of English literature and his earlier verse is among the finest of Romantic period.
• Wordsworth is extremely versatile and he was accomplished in a number of verse forms,
ranging from blank verse, sonnets and odes to ballads and delightfully simple lyrics.
• He is frequently thought of as a 'nature poet' : his pantheistic philosophy led him to belive
that men should enter into communion with nature.
• Wordsworth outlined his main principles
concerning poetry in a long preface-hailed by some critics as the manifesto of the English Romantic movement – which he added to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads in 1800.
The main points are as follows:
• The language of poetry was to consist of “a selection of
language really used by man” . In bringing his language closer to the everyday language of men, 'poetic diction'- with his artful figures of speech and elevated tone – was to be avoided as
much as possible.
• The subject of poetry was to consist of “incidents and situations from common life”.
• Wordsworth, like Blake and the romantic poets who succeeded them, attached great importance to the imagination.
• For Wordsworth the memory was a key element in poetic composition. His famous and oft quoted premise that
• “ all good poetry is the spontananeous overflow of powerful feelings” is clearly radical in its implications, but it should not be misunderstood as favouring the unrestained outouring of emotions.
• Wordsworth was instrumental in undermining the accepted eighteenth-century idea of the poet as a skilled craftsman versed in the dictates of socially acceptable artistic canons.
The poet, he says, is “a man speaking to men”
Major works:
• 1793- An Evening Walk, Descriptive Sketches;
• 1798-Lyrical Ballads (2nd edition 1800), a
collection of poems written in collaboration with Coleridge;
• 1798-1805- The Prelude, published following the author's death in 1850, an autobiographical poem in 14 books;
• 1807-Poems in Two Volumes;
• 1814- The Excursion, a nine-book poem which Wordsworth had planned to publish as part of a long philosophical poem on God, nature and man;
• 1815- Collected edition of his poems
"SHE DWELT AMONG THE UNTRODDEN WAYS"
• SHE dwelt among the untrodden ways
• Beside the springs of Dove,
• A Maid whom there were none to praise
• And very few to love:
• A violet by a mossy stone
• Half hidden from the eye!
• --Fair as a star, when only one
• Is shining in the sky.
•
• She lived unknown, and few could know
• When Lucy ceased to be;
10
• But she is in her grave, and, oh,
• The difference to me!
Structure and style
• "
She dwelt" consists of three quatrains, and describes a woman, Lucy, who lived insolitude near the source of the River Dove.
• In order to convey the dignity and
unaffected flowerlike naturalness of his
subject, Wordsworth uses simple language, mainly words of one syllable.
• In the opening quatrain, he describes the isolated and untouched area where Lucy
lived, while her innocence is explored in the second, during which her beauty is
compared to that of a hidden flower.
• A slumber did my spirit seal;
• I had no human fears:
• She seemed a thing that could not feel
• The touch of earthly years. (lines 1–4)
• The second stanza maintains the quiet, even tone of the first, but serves to undermine the former's sense of the eternal by revealing that Lucy has, by the time of composition, died. The narrator's response to her death lacks bitterness or emptiness; and instead
takes consolation from the fact that she is now beyond life's trials.
• No motion has she now, no force;
• She neither hears nor sees;
• Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
• With rocks, and stone, and trees.(lines 5–8)
Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800)
• Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
• "Strange fits of passion have I known"
• "She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways’’
• "Three years she grew"
• "A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal"
• "I travelled among unknown men"
• "Lucy Gray"
• "The Two April Mornings"
• "Nutting"
• "The Ruined Cottage"
• "Michael"
• "The Kitten At Play"
Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
• "Resolution and Independence"
• "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Also known as "Daffodils"
• "My Heart Leaps Up"
• "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
• "Ode to Duty"
• "The Solitary Reaper"
• "Elegiac Stanzas"
• "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"
• "London, 1802"
• "The world is too much with us"
The Excursion (1814)
• The Prelude (1850)
Death
• William Wordsworth died by re-aggravating a case of pleurisy on23 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.
