William Wordsworth 1770-1850

William Wordsworth was born and grew up in the Lake District, the beautiful area of mountains, lakes, and streams near the Scottish border in northwest England. The natural beauty and gran­deur of this area was a major source of inspiration for Wordsworth throughout his life. His family lived in the small town of Cockermouth in West Cumberland. His mother died when he was eight, and Wordsworth was sent to school at Hawkshead, a town further south in the Lake District. A lively though sometimes moody boy, he loved to spend his free time roaming about the countryside and getting to know the country people who lived there. Wordsworth's adult memories of these years are transformed into magnificent verse in the early books of The Prelude, his autobiographical poem.

Wordsworth was thirteen when his father died. The considerable sum of money left to the children was withheld for some years for legal reasons, but William ~was nevertheless able to attend Cam­bridge University in 1787 He found little in the formal university curriculum to interest him, how­ever, and he longed restlessly for his summer vaca­tions. During the vacation of his third year at Cambridge, Wordsworth went on a walking tour of France and the Alps with a close friend, Robert Jones. The year was 1790, and France was celebrat­ing the first anniversary of the Revolution. Already sympathetic to the democratic ideals that inspired the French Revolution, Wordsworth was filled with enthusiastic hope that France might lead the way to a new and more just social order.' He re­turned to France in 1791 after completing his degree at Cambridge. On this visit he became an even more fervent supporter of the Revolution, and he fell passionately in love with Annette Vallon, the daughter of a French surgeon. But lack of money forced Wordsworth to return to England, and by this time events in France had begun to take a grim and terribly destructive direction. The dec­laration of war between England and France in 1793 made it impossible for Wordsworth and An­nette to be reunited. The unhappiness, guilt, and disillusionment of these years brought Words­worth very near to mental collapse and despair.

In 1795, a friend and admirer of Wordsworth's died md left him enough money to live on while devoting himself entirely to writing poetry. With his sister Dorothy, to whom he was very close, Wordsworth settled in a small cottage at Race-down, Dorsetshire, in southwest England. Shortly afterward he was introduced to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and thus began one of the most impor tant and fruitful friendships in English literature. In 1797 Wordsworth and Dorothy moved to Alfox-den House in Somerset, to be near Coleridge, who lived only a few miles away at Nether Stowey. Al­ready an admirer of Wordsworth's early poetry, Coleridge convinced Wordsworth that he had far more to offer the world than he had ever dreamed. By talking and working with Coleridge, Words­worth moved beyond his period of sadness and despair and into the greatest creative phase of his life.

The concrete result of Wordswoith's friendship and collaboration with Coleridge was the first edi­tion of Lyiical Ballads, published in 1798. This collection, as we have already seen in the general introduction to the Romantic Age, signaled a revo­lution in English poetic theory and practice and es­tablished the foundation of English Romanticism. In 1799, almost as a kind of living confirmation of the deepest source of his poetic vision, Words­worth returned with Dorothy to their native Lake District and settled at Grasmere, in a small house later known as Dove Cottage. They would continue to live in this area for the rest of their lives. Coleridge followed them and rented a house at Keswick, thirteen miles away. In 1800 they pub­lished a second edition of Lyrical Ballads, which contains Wordsworth's Preface and a new volume of poems, including the famous "Lucy poems," many of which were written during a long and somber visit to Germany in the winter of 1798-1799.

In 1802 Wordsworth finally inherited the money left him by his father and married a childhood friend from the Lake District, Mary Hutchinson. But the years that followed, although they saw the full maturation of Wordsworth's powers as a poet, were filled with personal disaster. In 1805 his fa­vorite brother, John, a ship captain, was drowned at sea. The event is reflected in the "Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle," one of the finest poems to appear in Poems in Two Volumes, published in 1807. In 1810 the friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, which for various rea­sons had gradually become more cool and distant, was broken by an open quarrel. It was many years before the two men were reconciled. Two years later tragedy struck again—two of the Wordsworth children died. Offsetting the sadness of these mid­dle years, however, was the steady growth of Wordsworth's reputation as a poet. In 1805 he ac­cepted a government job as revenue collector for the county of Westmoreland, a sign not only of the national esteem he had won, but also of the grow­ing conservatism of his political views. In 1843, at age seventy-three, he was made poet laureate.

Many of Wordsworth's admirers, both contem­porary and modern, have seen a lamentable decline in Wordsworth's poetic powers after the decade of 1797-1807. And it is true that most of Words­worth's finest poems were already included in Lyrical Ballads and in Poems in Two Volumes. But we must remember that when the great decade came to an end, Wordsworth was thirty-seven, an age that none of the younger Romantics who so often complained about Wordsworth's conserva­tism and declining powers ever reached. Is it rea­sonable to expect that the remarkable creative energy of that great decade could be sustained through such a long life? In any case, Wordsworth continued to write poems, some of which give evi­dence of his work at its best, until his death in 1850 at the age of eighty.

Only after his death was Wordsworth's master­piece, The Prelude, published. In 1798 he had begun work on this monumental autobiographical poem, subtitled "Growth of a Poet's Mind," and in 1805 he completed a first version of it. But Words­worth continued to revise The Prelude for the rest of his lift In it, the two forces or processes that underlie all Wordsworth's best poetry are most fully realized. The first of these, announced in the poem's subtitle, is growth. The growth of the poet's mind and moral character from earliest childhood to adult maturity is seen not simply in a strictly autobiographical perspective, but also in a more general perspective that takes in the univer­sal patterns and processes common to all human minds. The second major force or process in Words­worth's poetry is memory. All genuine poetry "takes its origin," Wordsworth says in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, "from emotion recollected in tranquillity." It is memory that allows Words­worth to retrace the growth of his own moral and artistic self, and it is both the content and the process of memory that give his poetry its life, beauty, and power. The characteristic moment in Wordsworth's poetry comes when some aspect of the poet's present experience triggers his recollec­tion of a deeply meaningful experience in the past. What we see in the poem is the active, vital rela­tionship of present to past experience.

The process of memory in Wordsworth's poetry is very often set in motion by his response to the natural world, and it is the natural world to which Wordsworth returns, again and again, as the great source of human happiness and fulfillment. Yet it is misleading to call Wordsworth a "nature poet," if we mean by that a poet whose main concern lies in recording the 'details of nature for their own sake. Wordsworth is interested in nature as it af­fects, guides, and nourishes the human mind. For Wordsworth, to think of nature apart from what it means, or can mean, to humanity is a virtual con­tradiction.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834

Samuel Taylor Coleridge had one of the most fer­tile and versatile minds in English literature. His poetic output is relatively small, although it con­tains such masterpieces as The Rime of the An­cient Manner, "Kubla Khan," and "Frost at Mid­night." His work as a literary critic and theorist, however, is massive; and his judgments and ideas are still enormously influential today. The fact that many of Coleridge's most ambitious literary projects were never completed should not obscure the awesome value and scope of what he actually accomplished.

Born in rural Devonshire, Coleridge was the son of a clergyman and the youngest of fourteen chil­dren. He was ten years old when his father died, and he was sent to live and attend school in Lon­don. Coleridge recalls his early years in London with a sense of dreamy sadness in "Frost at Mid­night":

For I was reared