The Lake District So Popular Today chapter the Romantic Movement and The Lake Poets

2.1 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
William Wordsworth, regarded as the most celebrated and and influential Romantic English poet, and as the greatest English poet after and Milton, was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District in the north of England, the third son John Wordsworth, attorney to James Lowther, the Earl of Lonsdale. He was educared at primaShakespearery schools in Cockermouth and Penrith, and from 1779 to 1787 at Hawhshead Grammar School. Wordsworth lost his mother when he was eight years old, and his father when he was thriteen, in 1783. Wordsworth was denied the blessing of a happy home. Domestic arrangements caused Wil-liam to be separated for nine years from his beloved sister, Dorothy Wordsworth. In 1787 William entered St John's College, Cambridge, (1787-1791) Where he did not like the unfamiliar climate of wordliness and intellec-tual sophistication.He was born (1770 – 1850)Nikola Benin, Ph.DWilliam Wordsworth, regarded as the most celebrated and and influential Romantic Englishpoet, and as the greatest English poet after Shakespeare and Milton, was born atCockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District in the north of England, the third son JohnWordsworth, attorney to James Lowther, the Earl of Lonsdale. He was educared at primaryschools in Cockermouth and Penrith, and from 1779 to 1787 at Hawhshead Grammar School.[25.33]Wordsworth lost his mother when he was eight years old, and his father when he was thriteen,in 1783. Wordsworth was denied the blessing of a happy home. Domestic arrangementscaused Wil-liam to be separated for nine years from his beloved sister, Dorothy Wordsworth.In 1787 William entered St John's College, Cambridge, (1787-1791) Where he did not like theunfamiliar climate of wordliness and intellec-tual sophistication.Revolutionary SympathiesWordsworth spent the summer and autumn of 1790 on a walking tour in France, Switzerland,the Alps, Italy and Germany, which is described in Descriptive Sketches, composed in 1792.In 1791 he took an ordinary BA degree at Cambridge, then Wordsworth returned to France tospend a year there; he stayed at Blois and Or-leans, with occasional visits to Paris. This periodof revolutionary events in France was one of the most impor-tant periods of his life.Wordsworth was fired by a deep and passionate faith in teh Revolution, fell in love withAnnette Vallon, by whom he had a daughter, Caroline, in 1792. He thought of marryingAnnette, but he ran out of money and his uncles refused to provide him with money for hisresidence abroad. In harsh necessity he re-turned to England in December 1792.At the age of 23, in January 1793, he published two poems in heroic couplets, in theeighteenth-century tra-dition, "An Evening Walk" and "Descriptive Sketches, which established him as a poet. It was the year in which Wordsworth identified himself with theideas expressed by the radical politician and writer Thomas Paine (1737-1809) in his workThe Rights of Man (1791-1792).[11.32]The period 1793-95 was one of depression for Wordsworth,of great personal unhappiness and uncertainty about his professional future, and moral andintel-lectual confusion, towards the end of which he seems to have been close to nervousbreakdown. He was dis-mayed by the drift of the French Revolution into the political terror ofthe Jacobin dictatorship; he still believed in the French experiment as the future model for allEuropean countries, when England declared war against France in February 1793, but he wasdivided in his national loyalties, and effectively separated for good from Annette and hischild. His return to France was barred, and his personal communication with France cut offfor nine years. Wordsworth did not conceal his hatred of King, Regent and Ministry; thesefeelings are expressed in his prose Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, and his poem Guilt andSorrow, or Incidents on Salisbury Plain. When the French Revolution passed into Terror, thepoet lost his trust in immediate social reform, and turned to abstract meditation on man andsociety, abd fell briefly under the unfluence of Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.In the summer of 1793 he undertook a walking tour from Salisbury to Wales, during he whichhe first visited Tintern Abbey.Dorothy, Wordsworth and ColeridgeIn 1795 Wordsworth's precarious financial condition changed for the better; his Penrith friendRaisley Cal-vert died, leaving him a legacy of £ 900 in order to enable him to pursue hisvocation as a poet and to realize his long-cherished dream of setting up house with Dorothy,with whom he had been reunited in 1794.[5.31] They settled first at Racedown in Dorset, then atAlfoxden in Somerset, taking charge of the small son of their widower friend,Basil Montagu.The move to Alfoxden was influenced by a desire to be near to their exciting new friend,Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom Wordsworth had met, along with Robert Southey, during astay at Bristol in 1795, and who was living at Nether Stowey. This was a period of intensecreativity for both Wordsworth and Coleridge. They were encouraged and in many waysinspired by Dorothy, whose influence upon Coleridge was almost as strong as her influenceupon her brother. In this period of intense creativity they produced a collection of poems, theLyrical Ballads (1798), a landmark in the history of English literature, which inaugurated theRomantic period of English poetry.Dorothy, Wordsworth and Coleridge spent the winter of 1798-99 in Germany. Coleridgewanted to com-plete his philosophical education and wnet to the University of Göttingen,while Dorothy and William settled in the remote little town of Goslar. Here William wrote theenigmatic "Lucy" poems and began the Prelude, which was completed in its two-part versionat the end of 1999.The "Lyrical Ballads" and the Wordsworth-Coleridge CollaborationAt the end of 1799 the Wordsworth returned to England and settled in Dove Cottage,Grasmere, in his na-tive Lake District. William Wordsworth continued to write poems, manyof which were included in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, published in 1880, whichalso contained a provocative new Preface on poetic diction that became the aesthetic manifesto of English Romanticism and aroused much criticism. After Lord Lonsdale death in1802 Wordsworth financial situation was improved by the payment to the family of the moneyowed to John Wordsworth. During the short-lived peace of Amiens William went to Francewith Doro-thy to visit Annette Vallon and his daughter; later that year the poet married MaryHutchinson, with whom he hae been friendly since childhood. They had five children.Wordsworth completed The Prelude in its second, 13-book form in 1805, and continued tocompose poems and some of his most celebrated lyrics which appeared in Poems in twoVolumes in 1807. Now he was at the height of his creative powers and the head of ahousehold steadily devoted to his fame. Some of Wordsworth's new friends were Sir WalterScott, Sir George Beau-mont, and the young De Quincey. In 1809-1810 ordsworth contributedto Coleridge's periodical The Friend, and produced a Tract "On the Convention of Cintra"(1809).Wordsworth's Married LifeWordsworth domestic and married life was happy, except for the loss of his brother John atsea in 1805, which came as a cruel blow, the early deaths of two of the Wordsworths' childrenin 1812 that saddened their middle years, and the physical deterioration of Coleridge. A further disappointement for Wordsworth was his estrangement for some time fromColeridge in 1810. In 1812 there was a kind of reconciliation between the two poets, but theywere never entirely reconciled, and the old intimacy was never restored. HoweverWordsworth's productivity continued, and his popularity gradually increased. In 1813 he wasappointed to the sinecure of Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland, a post which broughthim some £400 a year.The Conservative WordsworthFrom 1808 he had lived at Allan Bank, now he moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside, where heremained for the rest of his life. The great production of his early and middle years was nowover, and Wordsworth slowly settled into the role of patriotic, conservative public man,abandoning the radical politics and idealism of his youth. He was far from from thecosmopolitan radicalism of his youth, and the openly reactionary politics and priestlypatriotism became a bone of contention between Wordsworth and the Romantic poets of thesecond generation. In 1818 the young poet John Keats was dismayed when he discovered thatWordsworth was busy campaigning for the Tory Lord Lonsdale in the general election. Thepoem The Excursion was published in 1814, followed by many collected editions of old andnew poetical works, frequently revised and reclassified, over the next 36 years. At the age of50 Wordsworth's poetic powers began to decline. Much of the best of his later work wasmildly topographical, inspired by his love of travel. In 1828 he toured the Rhineland with hisdaughter Dora, and Coleridge, and in 1831 stayed with Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, on theway to the High-lands. He was honoured by the universities of Durham (1838) and Oxford(1839); in 1842 he received a Civil List pension of £300 a year, and in 1843 he succeededRobert Southey as Poet Laureate (1843-1850). A monumental figure in English literature, thepoet died at Rydal Mount in April 1850, after the publication of a revised text of his works insix volumes (1849-50), and The Prelude, now widely considered to be his most im-portant work, was published posthmously in July 1850. William Wordsworth was buried in Grasmerechurch-yard. Dorothy Wordsworth died in 1855; Coleridge had died in 1834.Poetical WorksWordsworth's major publications include:Early Single Poems An Evening Walk (1793), a poem in heroic couplets and a conventio nal attempt at the pic-turesque and sublime.Descriptive Sketches (1793) a poem in heroic couplets and an attempt at the picturesque anssublime.Guilt and Sorrow [24.33], or "Adventures on Salisbury Plain", or The Female Vagrantpublished in the "Lyrical Ballads".The Waggoner (composed in 1805 and published in 1819)Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse [composed in 1798 and published in 1819].The Ruined Cottage (1797-98, included in "The Excursion" in 1814.)Collections of PoemsLyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems were issued anonymously by Wordsworth andColeridge in 1798 -(first edition 1798, second edition 1800, third edition 1802), is a collectionof poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge. The Lyrical Ballads were based on subjects fromordinary life and were designed to raise that quic kened response to daily exis-tence which itwas thought had been discoloured by "the lethargy of custom." Wordsworth would inspiretheir audience to see the world freshly, sympathetically and naturally.The following titles aresome of the most famous poems included in the collection "Lyrical Ballads" :Lines Written in Early Spring (1798)The Nightingale (1798)The Brothers. A Pastoral Poem (1799-1800)Poor Susan (probably composed between 1797-1800)Michael. A Pastoral Poem.(1800)Tintern Abbey (1798)The Lucy Poems (1799-1800)Lucy Gray; Or, SolitudePoems in Two Volumes (1807), among which the best known titles are:Ode to Duty (1804)Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Child hood, or Ode: PauloMajora Canamus(1802-1804)Resolution and Independence (1802)Composed Upon Westminster Bridge (1802)The Solitary Reaper (1805)"I wondered Lonely as a Cloud" (generally known as "Daffodils" (1802)Elegiac Stanzas (1806-1807).Longer PoemsThe Excursion (1814) is a poem in nine books. In his preface Wordsworth announced that hewas embarked on a huge poetic project of a three-part poem entitled The Recluse, of whichthe middle part of nine-books, The Excursion, and other blank-verse long poems, such asHome at Grasmere and The Tuft of Primroses, were only fragments. The work he had plannedin 1798, when the poet was living near Coleridge at Alfoxden, was described as a "philosophical poem, containing views of man, nature, and society, and to be entitled "The Recluse", ashaving for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement." Thearchitectural figure that Wordsworth used to characterize this project was a Gothic church,with its antechapel, main church, and small oratories as allegorical components of his works.The Prelu de was originally in-tended to be the introduction to the first part of The Recluse. In The Excursion that is the longest and completed section, the poet travels with a Wanderer, aphilosophic pedlar, through whom he meets the pedlar's friend, the sad and pessimistic Solitary, a recent enthusiast for the French Revolu tion and now dispirited by events inFrance. The source of the Solitary's despondency is his lack of religious faith and loss ofconfidence in the virtue of man; for this reason he is reproved with gentle and persuasiveargument. Then a Pastor enters the scene, who illustrates the harmonizing effects of virtue andreligion through accounts of the lives of the people buried in his churchyard.