what is the biography of william wordsworth

William Wordsworth

(1770-1850)

Who Was William Wordsworth?

Poet William Wordsworth worked with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads (1798). The collection, which contained Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," introduced Romanticism to English poetry. Wordsworth also showed his affinity for nature with the famous poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." He became England's poet laureate in 1843, a role he held until his death in 1850.

Poet William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Wordsworth’s mother died when he was 7, and he was an orphan at 13. Despite these losses, he did well at Hawkshead Grammar School — where he wrote his first poetry — and went on to study at Cambridge University. He did not excel there, but managed to graduate in 1791.

Wordsworth had visited France in 1790 — in the midst of the French Revolution — and was a supporter of the new government’s republican ideals. On a return trip to France the next year, he fell in love with Annette Vallon, who became pregnant. However, the declaration of war between England and France in 1793 separated the two. Left adrift and without income in England, Wordsworth was influenced by radicals such as William Godwin.

In 1795, Wordsworth received an inheritance that allowed him to live with his sister, Dorothy. That same year, Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The two became friends, and together worked on Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume contained poems such as Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," and helped Romanticism take hold in English poetry.

The same year that Lyrical Ballads was published, Wordsworth began writing The Prelude , an epic autobiographical poem that he would revise throughout his life (it was published posthumously in 1850). While working on The Prelud e, Wordsworth produced other poetry, such as "Lucy." He also wrote a preface for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads ; it described his poetry as being inspired by powerful emotions and would come to be seen as a declaration of Romantic principles.

"Though nothing can bring back the hour, Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower." -- from Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

In 1802, a temporary lull in fighting between England and France meant that Wordsworth was able to see Vallon and their daughter, Caroline. After returning to England, he wed Mary Hutchinson, who gave birth to the first of their five children in 1803. Wordsworth was also still writing poetry, including the famous "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." These pieces were published in another Wordsworth collection, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807).

Evolving Poetry and Philosophy

As he grew older, Wordsworth began to reject radicalism. In 1813, he was named as a distributor of stamps and moved his family to a new home in the Lake District. By 1818, Wordsworth was an ardent supporter of the conservative Tories.

Though Wordsworth continued to produce poetry — including moving work that mourned the deaths of two of his children in 1812 — he had reached a zenith of creativity between 1798 and 1808. It was this early work that cemented his reputation as an acclaimed literary figure.

In 1843, Wordsworth became England's poet laureate, a position he held for the rest of his life. At the age of 80, he died on April 23, 1850, at his home in Rydal Mount, Westmorland, England.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: William Wordsworth
• Birth Year: 1770
• Birth date: April 7, 1770
• Birth City: Cockermouth, Cumberland, England
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: At the end of the 18th century, poet William Wordsworth helped found the Romantic movement in English literature. He also wrote "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Aries
• Cambridge University
• Death Year: 1850
• Death date: April 23, 1850
• Death City: Rydal Mount, Westmorland, England
• Death Country: United Kingdom

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: William Wordsworth Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/william-wordsworth
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 27, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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Poet Biographies

The Romantic and Natural World of William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth, one of the most celebrated poets of the Romantic era, was a master of capturing the beauty and power of nature in his works. His famous poems continue to inspire readers and nature enthusiasts alike, making Wordsworth a timeless literary figure.

Wordsworth was a leading figure in the Romantic poetry movement that focused on life’s daily experience in his writing. He is known for his fascination with the natural world and explores the emotional response one might have from it. His philosophy surrounds the notion that nature can be a restorative and a great source of inspiration. His writing helped propel English literature for years after his death and is widely studied and admired to this day. 

Wordsworth’s poetry was controversial in his own time, as some critics found his emphasis on emotion and the individual to be too subjective and lacking in formal structure.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility William Wordsworth Quote

Wordsworth was the second of five children born to parents John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson in the now-historic Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, or modern Cumbria. The home is centered in the Lake District, the area that Wordsworth and many of his contemporaries came to be associated with. He also spent part of his youth in Penrith. He was born a year before his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth. He maintained a strong relationship with her throughout his life. He wrote several poems with his sister in mind or as a character in a broader setting . These include  ‘ To My Sister. ’

William Wordsworth’s father was a legal representative and was often away from home. He died in 1783, having remained distant from his son throughout his life. Despite this, there is evidence to suggest that John Wordsworth encouraged his son to read poems by John Milton ,  Edmund Spenser , and more. His library was an essential resource in Wordsworth’s development. His mother, Ann, died in 1778, a few years before his father.

After his mother’s death, William’s father sent him away to Hawkshead Grammar School and sent his sister to live in Yorkshire with some relatives. Unfortunately, due to this, the two siblings did not end up seeing each other again for nine years.

Writing Career  

Wordsworth’s poetry  was first published in  The European Magazine  in 1787. This same year he started at St. Johns College, Cambridge, where he received a BA in 1791. Around this same period of time, he went on a walking tour of Europe. His first complete poetic publication appeared in 1793 and was titled An Evening Walk. It was followed that same year by  Descriptive Sketches.

A few years later, he met fellow poet  Samuel Taylor Coleridge  with whom he’d publish his best-known collection,  Lyrical Ballads .  It appeared in 1798 and is today considered to be the start of the Romantic period in English literature. It included poems like ‘ Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey ,’ ‘ Lines Written in Early Spring ,’  and  ‘ We are Seven .’  Coleridge famously contributed  ‘ The Rime of the Ancient Mariner .’  The poems in this collection are some of the most important and widely read in the English language.

When the second edition was published two years later, Wordsworth was the only one listed as a contributor. He sought, as explained through the preface, to create poetry that used language “really used by men” and avoided the poetic diction of the previous periods. He famously defined poetry as:

the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

Around the same period that William Wordsworth and Coleridge published the first edition of  Lyrical Ballads,  the two traveled to Germany along with Dorothy Wordsworth. Later, Wordsworth started work on ‘ The Prelude,’  commonly considered to be his masterpiece, while living with his sister in Goslar. During this period, Wordsworth wrote a great number of poems ranging in  themes from death to separation . Additionally, he, along with Coleridge,  Robert Southey , and several other poets, became known as the Lake Poets .

In 1807, Coleridge published  Poems, in Two Volumes.  This collection included  ‘ Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood .’  Unfortunately, the collection did not do as well as  Lyrical Ballads,  the volume for which he’s most commonly cited today.

In 1814, he published ‘ The Excursion ’, intended as the second part of ‘ The Recluse,’  a long philosophical poem. Some believe that Wordsworth’s work declined during this period in part due to the considerable success he’d achieved.

Romantic Poetry

William Wordsworth was one of the greatest romantic poets of all time. One of the most creative spells in his career was from 1799 to 1808, when he moved to Grasmere, on the edge of Lake District. This period of his life has been described as a time of ‘high thinking,’ where he lived with his sister Dorothy. By consistently living in such a location, full of nature, it is easy to see how his poetic style , based on the relationship between human beings and nature, developed fully. 

An example of his fascination with nature is seen in his poem ‘ I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud ,’ where he describes the bliss of solitude in combination with nature. It also shows the synergistic relationship that we have with our environment.

Personal Life and Relationships  

In the early 1790s, William Wordsworth fell in love with Annette Vallon, a French woman who gave birth to their daughter, Caroline, in 1792. He met her after visiting the country during the period of the French Revolution. It is said that he became captivated by the Republican movement and revolutionary France as a whole. However, he was forced to return to England without her the following year but continued to support her and their child to the best of his abilities as time passed. Caroline married in 1816, and Wordsworth settled £30 a year on her for the next twenty years.

When Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy returned to France to see Annette in the early 1800s, he broke to news to her that he’d be marrying Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend. Dorothy lived with the couple and became close friends with Mary. Together, Mary and William Wordsworth had five children; they were John, Dora, Thomas, Catherine, and William. Three of the five died before Mary and William did.

Coleridge and Wordsworth’s relationship fell apart in 1810 due to Coleridge’s opium addiction. Unfortunately, two years later, Wordsworth’s daughter Catherine died at three years old, and then his son Thomas died at six years old only six months later. His daughter Dora died in 1847. This was around the same time that Wordsworth stopped writing.

Wordsworth, Mary, and Dorothy moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside, in 1813, where the poet spent the rest of his life. He mended his relationship with Coleridge in 1828, six years before the latter’s death. This was the same year that their close friend  Charles Lamb , brother to  Mary Lamb , also died.

In 1843, Wordsworth was named  Poet Laureate of the UK , an honor he initially declined due to his age. Later, he accepted when the prime minister assured him that he’d have to do nothing in the role. He was succeeded by  Alfred Lord Tennyson  in the year of his death.

Death and  The Prelude

William Wordsworth died on April 23rd, 1850, at his home in Rydal Mount from complications associated with pleurisy. His poem, ‘ The Prelude,’ was published posthumously by his wife. It is today considered to be the most important achievement of English Romanticism . Read an extract from ‘The Prelude,’ titled ‘ Boat Stealing,’ here.

Influence from other Poets

William Wordsworth, like many poets before him, was influenced by other writers and brought elements of their work into his. Some of his greatest influences were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Milton , William Shakespeare , and, as previously discussed, his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge . 

Although Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher, his ideas ran very close to those of Wordsworth. Rousseau’s focus on the goodness of nature, its inspirational power, and how man is inherently good connected with Wordsworth. This philosophy subsequently made up a large part of his thematic direction. 

Wordsworth had a great admiration for John Milton and his use of words, language, and incredible ability to create characters of great complexity. Similarly, William Shakespeare’s poetry had an impact on Wordsworth, again with his generation of characters and capability with powerful imagery .

William Wordsworth is best known for his romantic, emotional poetry, which pays particular attention to the connection between the common man and the natural world. The 18th-century poet wrote a number of romantic poems that went on to inspire many poets after him.

Arguably, William Wordsworth’s most famous poem is ‘ I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud ‘. An extract of his magnum opus, ‘ The Prelude ,’ the poem is centered around the positive impact that the natural world can have on the mood of a person. But by simply walking in a field of daffodils, he described how his view of the world shifted.

William Wordsworth is actually considered by many scholars and poetry lovers to be the master of Romantic Poetry . His work expertly depicts human emotion, the natural world, and our synergistic relationship with it.

It was said that William Wordsworth suffered from a stomach ailment that eventually halted his poetry altogether in 1801. He would experience chronic indigestion and heartburn that would actually make it painful for him to sit down and write.

William Wordsworth succumbed to a case of pleurisy on April 23rd, 1850, at his home in Grasmere. One of his greatest-ever literary works, ‘ The Prelude ,’ which he had spent over 50 years working on, was released posthumously and later defined his genius for years to come.

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William Wordsworth Biography

Early life – William Wordsworth

Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, in north-west England. His father, John Wordsworth, introduced the young William to the great poetry of Milton and Shakespeare , but he was frequently absent during William’s childhood. Instead, Wordsworth was brought up by his mother’s parents in Penrith, but this was not a happy period. He frequently felt in conflict with his relations and at times contemplated ending his life. However, as a child, he developed a great love of nature, spending many hours walking in the fells of the Lake District. He also became very close to his sister, Dorothy, who would later become a poet in her own right.

In 1778, William was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire; this separated him from his beloved sister for nearly nine years. In 1787, he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge. It was in this year that he had his first published work, a sonnet in the European Magazine . While still a student at Cambridge, in 1790, he travelled to revolutionary France. He was deeply impressed by the revolutionary spirit and the principles of liberty and egalite. He also fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon; together they had an illegitimate daughter, Anne Caroline.

Friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge

After graduating, Wordsworth was fortunate to receive a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert to pursue a career in literature. He was able to publish his first collection of poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches . That year he was also to meet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. They became close friends and collaborated on poetic ideas. They later published a joint work – Lyrical Ballards (1798), and Wordsworth greatest work ‘ The Prelude ‘ was initially called by Wordsworth ‘ To Coleridge ‘

This period was important for Wordsworth and also the direction of English poetry. With Coleridge , Keats and Shelley , Wordsworth helped create a much more spontaneous and emotional poetry. It sought to depict the beauty of nature and the quintessential depth of human emotion. In the preface to Lyrical Ballards , Wordsworth writes of poetry:

“The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Lyrical Ballards includes some of his best-known poems, such as, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, “A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal”.

A SLUMBER did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.

– W. Wordsworth 1799.

In 1802, after returning from a brief visit to see his daughter, Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy continued to live with the couple, and she became close to Mary as well as her brother. William and Mary had five children, though three died early.

Lake District, North Windermere, near Grasmere.

In 1807, he published another important volume of poetry “ Poems, in Two Volumes “, this included famous poems such as; “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, “My Heart Leaps Up”, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.”

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils;

– W. Wordsworth – I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

In 1813, he received an appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland; this annual income of £400 gave him greater financial security and enabled him to devote his spare time to poetry. In 1813, he family also moved into Rydal Mount, Grasmere; a picturesque location, which inspired his later poetry.

“My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die!”

Poet Laureate

By the 1820s, the critical acclaim for Wordsworth was growing, though ironically critics note that, from this period, his poetry began losing some of its vigour and emotional intensity. His poetry was perhaps a reflection of his own ideas. The 1790s had been a period of emotional turmoil and faith in the revolutionary ideal. Towards the end of his life, his disillusionment with the French Revolution had made him more conservative in outlook. In 1839 he received an honorary degree from Oxford University and received a civil pension of £300 a year from the government. In 1843, he was persuaded to become the nation’s Poet Laureate, despite saying he wouldn’t write any poetry as Poet Laureate. Wordsworth is the only Poet Laureate who never wrote poetry during his official time in the job.

Wordsworth died of pleurisy on 23 April 1850. He was buried in St Oswald’s Church Grasmere. After his death, his widow Mary published his autobiographical ‘Poem to Coleridge’ under the title “The Prelude”.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of William Wordsworth” , Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net , 22nd Jan. 2010. Last updated 6th March 2018

William Wordsworth – The Major Works

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Poems & Poets

William Wordsworth 101

Some of contemporary poetry’s roots in wordsworth’s poetics..

BY Benjamin Voigt

“What is a poet?” William Wordsworth asks in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800), and indeed few have answered that question with as decisive and lasting an impact as Wordsworth himself. Dissatisfied with “the gaudiness and inane phraseology” of 18th-century verse and inspired by his travels in revolutionary France, the great Romantic poet saw the role of a poet as “a man speaking to men,” as someone who could capture everyday people and events in everyday language. It was a revolutionary idea in English poetry: that the voice or speech of poetry should sound the way non-aristocrats actually spoke. But he didn’t stop there. In his remarkable Preface, Wordsworth provides his contemporaries with a new idea of a creative genius: an artist “who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind.” Lastly, his famous definition of poetry in the Preface as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings … recollected in tranquillity” continues to influence our ideas about the source and subject of poetry, as does his belief in the essential relationship between mind and nature.

Those revolutionary ideas were also Wordsworth’s poetic principles, which he applied to his own poetry throughout his long career. This sampling, presented in order of publication, offers a glimpse of how, in both form and content, his work expanded the notion of what was possible in poetry.

“ The Tables Turned ” The language of this poem is typical of many in Lyrical Ballads , his landmark first book, which he coauthored with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge . Composed in rhyming quatrains of iambic trimeter or tetrameter , it imitates the songs of bards and the “plainer and more emphatic language” of vernacular speech. But instead of telling a story, as the book often does, “Tables” uses the form to make an argument—an argument to, ironically, “quit your books” and “Let Nature be your teacher.” His directives make historical sense: reacting to the scientistic foment of Enlightenment Europe, he offers a vision in which feelings and sensation, not “meddling intellect,” are held in highest esteem. “Come forth,” he invites us, “and bring with you a heart / That watches and receives.”

“ She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways ” Many of Wordsworth’s poems describe an illuminating encounter with a country person, with a wise (or at least impassioned) rustic who somehow enlarges the poet’s understanding. This powerful ballad , on the other hand, emphasizes its subject’s distance and isolation. One of a series of poems Wordsworth wrote about Lucy, an English girl who died young, its brevity gives it much of its gravity: just three stanzas long, its story is over almost as soon as it starts. Scholars have long speculated about the figure of Lucy, suggesting variously that she’s a stand-in for Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy ; a childhood friend; or a personification of Wordsworth’s muse. But her identity remains as unknown as the character in the poem, and she would have remained obscure if not for Wordsworth’s elevation—or invention—of her.

“ Tintern Abbey ” The final poem in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads , this meditative lyric is a model of the form and of Wordsworth’s belief in nature’s succor. Returning to the picturesque ruins of Tintern Abbey after five years, the poet seeks to reconcile past, present, and future: he laments the loss of the “dizzy raptures” he found in nature as a boy and anticipates how his more mature glimpses “of something far more deeply interfused” in “the mighty world / of eye, and ear” will continue to nourish his soul long after he departs. But the “green pastoral landscape” he describes here was already, notably, a memory, if not a fiction. Romanticism’s worship of the natural developed alongside rapid technological change, and, as scholars such as Marjorie Levinson note, Wordsworth’s famous portrait of the Wye excludes the coal barges traveling the river, Tintern’s ironworks, and the region’s manifest poverty.

“ Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood ” For Wordsworth, children hold a privileged position: they are our “best Philosopher” and “Nature’s Priest” because their innocence allows them to “read’st the eternal deep.” But as this famous ode to childhood reminds us, this worldview is essentially tragic. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” Wordsworth writes, but “shades of the prison-house begin to close / upon the growing Boy.” This is the poem’s inciting “thought of grief”—that life is essentially a falling away, and “nothing can bring back the hour / of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.” The poem ultimately returns to praise, resolving to “find / strength in what remains,” but Wordsworth continued to explore this problem of Romantic thought throughout his life, engaging with it in other poems, such as his proto-environmental sonnet “ The World Is Too Much With Us .”

“ Surprised by Joy ” Preferring forms more given to naturalistic simplicity, Wordsworth initially regarded sonnets as “egregiously absurd.” But after reading Milton with his sister (and important collaborator), Dorothy, in 1802, the poet became quite taken with the form and went on to write more than 500, including “ Scorn not the Sonnet ,” an ode to the poetic form. “Surprised by Joy” is among his most pained, personal pieces. Addressed to his daughter, who died in infancy, the poem finds the heart in conflict with itself: its irregular rhymes describe how her memory transforms a moment’s happiness to guilt and despair. It notably never identifies the source of that joy, his “transport,” and offers an honest moment in which Nature proves useless—if not indifferent—to the poet, offering only “unborn hours.”

“ Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg ” As he gained literary stature later in his career, Wordsworth turned toward historical subjects, travel writing, and, increasingly, the elegy. Written in 1835, this poem eulogizes James Hogg, a fellow poet and friend. An uneducated folk poet, Hogg was an inspiration for Wordsworth and guided him on tours of the Yarrow, a river in Scotland that Wordsworth wrote about several times of the course of his career—first in “ Yarrow Unvisited ,” then “ Yarrow Visited ,” and finally in “ Yarrow Revisited .” Wordsworth was given to creative relationships, to collaboration and commiseration, and this “effusion” sees Wordsworth also paying tribute to others who had recently died—his longtime confidant and interlocutor Coleridge and fellow poet Charles Lamb .

from The Prelude : Book 1: Childhood and School-time Originally intended as a prologue to The Recluse , a long philosophical poem Wordsworth never completed , the 14-book Prelude instead became the poet’s magnum opus in and of itself. It was truly the product of a lifetime: Wordsworth continued to revise and expand his initial 1799 composition for many years, publishing a full version in 1805. A final, extended version of the poem was published in 1850, after his death. With The Prelude, Wordsworth sought to “be taught / to understand [himself]” and “to know / with better knowledge how [his] heart was fram’d.” This first section recounts incidents from his earliest childhood; later sections detail his philosophy of the imagination and his journeys to the Alps and revolutionary France. It is, in essence, an autobiographical epic , elevating his thoughts, feelings, and growth to the level of myth and to the classical subjects of Milton and Homer. This radical turn toward individual consciousness anticipates—and paves the way for—the subjective turn of 20th-century art and the prominence of the lyric mode in contemporary poetry.

William Wordsworth: Biography

Glenn everett , associate professor of english, university of tennessee at martin.

Victorian Web Home —> Some Pre-Victorian Authors —> British Romanticism —> William Wordsworth ]

The Poet's birthplace and childhood home — the Wordsworth House, Cockermouth

William Wordsworth was born April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, to John and Anne (Cookson) Wordsworth, the second of their five children. His father was law agent and rent collector for Lord Lonsdale, and the family was fairly well off. After his mother's death in 1778 he was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School, near Windermere; in 1787 he went up to St. John's College, Cambridge . He enjoyed hiking: during the "long" (i.e., summer) vacation of 1788 he tramped around Cumberland county; two years later went on a walking tour of France, Switzerland, and Germany; and in 1791, after graduation, trekked through Wales.

His enthusiasm for the French Revolution took him to France again in 1791, where he had an affair with Annette Vallon, who bore him an illegitimate daughter, Caroline, in 1792. Having run out of money, Wordsworth returned to England the following year, and the Anglo-French war, following the Reign of Terror, prevented his return for nine years.

In 1794 he was reunited with his sister Dorothy, who became his companion, close friend, moral support, and housekeeper until her physical and mental decline in the 1830s. The next year he met Coleridge , and the three of them grew very close, the two men meeting daily in 1797-98 to talk about poetry and to plan Lyrical Ballads , which came out in 1798. The three friends travelled to Germany that fall, a trip that produced intellectual stimulation for Coleridge and homesickness for Wordsworth. After their return, William and Dorothy settled in his beloved Lake district , near Grasmere.

The Peace of Amiens in 1802 allowed Wordsworth and his sister to visit France again to see Annette and Caroline. They arrived at a mutually agreeable settlement, and a few months later, after receiving an inheritance owed by Lord Lonsdale since John Wordsworth's death in 1783, William married Mary Hutchinson. By 1810 they had five children, but their happiness was tempered by the loss at sea of William's brother John (1805), the alienation from Coleridge in 1810, and the death of two children in 1812. In 1813 Wordsworth received an appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, and the £400 per year which went with this post made him financially secure. The whole family, which included Dorothy, moved to Rydal Mount, between Grasmere and Rydal Water).

Wordsworth's literary career began with Descriptive Sketches (1793) and reached an early climax before the turn of the century, with Lyrical Ballads . His powers peaked with Poems in Two Volumes (1807), and his reputation continued to grow; even his harshest reviewers recognized his popularity and the originality.

The important later works were well under way. His success with shorter forms made him the more eager to succeed with longer, specifically with a long, three-part "philosophical poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society, . . having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement." The 17,000 lines which were eventually published made up only a part of this mammoth project. The second section, The Excursion , was completed (pub. 1814), as was the first book of the first part, The Recluse . During his lifetime he refused to print The Prelude , which he had completed by 1805, because he thought it was unprecedented for a poet to talk as much about himself — unless he could put it in its proper setting, which was as an introduction to the complete three-part Recluse .

William and Mary Wordsworth's Grave

Inspiration gradually failed him for this project, and he spent much of his later life revising The Prelude . Critics quarrel about which version is better, the 1805 or the 1850, but agree that in either case it is the most successful blank verse epic since Paradise Lost .

Finally fully reconciled to Coleridge, the two of them toured the Rhineland in 1828. Durham University granted him an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838, and Oxford conferred the same honor the next year. When Robert Southey died in 1843, Wordsworth was named Poet Laureate. He died in 1850, and his wife published the much-revised Prelude that summer.

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William Wordsworth Biography

Born: April 7, 1770 Cookermouth, Cumberland, England Died: April 23, 1850 Rydal Mount, Westmorland, England English poet

William Wordsworth was an early leader of romanticism (a literary movement that celebrated nature and concentrated on human emotions) in English poetry and ranks as one of the greatest lyric poets in the history of English literature.

His early years

William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cookermouth, Cumberland, England, the second child of an attorney. Unlike the other major English romantic poets, he enjoyed a happy childhood under the loving care of his mother and was very close to his sister Dorothy. As a child he wandered happily through the lovely natural scenery of Cumberland. In grammar school, Wordsworth showed a keen interest in poetry. He was fascinated by the epic poet John Milton (1608–1674).

From 1787 to 1790 Wordsworth attended St. John's College at Cambridge University. He always returned to his home and to nature during his summer vacations. Before graduating from Cambridge, he took a walking tour through France, Switzerland, and Italy in 1790. The Alps made an impression on him that he did not recognize until fourteen years later.

Stay in France

Wordsworth fell passionately in love with a French girl, Annette Vallon. She gave birth to their daughter in December 1792. However, Wordsworth had spent his limited funds and was forced to return home. The separation left him with a sense of guilt that deepened his poetic inspiration and resulted in an important theme in his work of abandoned women.

Publication of first poems

Wordsworth's first poems, Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk, were printed in 1793. He wrote several pieces over the next several years. The year 1797 marked the beginning of Wordsworth's long friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834). Together they published Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Wordsworth wanted to challenge "the gaudiness [unnecessarily flashy] and inane [foolish] phraseology [wording] of many modern writers." Most of his poems in this collection centered on the simple yet deeply human feelings of ordinary people, phrased in their own language. His views on this new kind of poetry were more fully described in the important "Preface" that he wrote for the second edition (1800).

"Tintern Abbey"

Wordsworth's most memorable contribution to this volume was "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," which he wrote just in time to include it. This poem is the first major piece to illustrate his original talent at its best. It skillfully combines matter-of-factness in natural description with a genuinely mystical (magical) sense of infinity, joining self-exploration to philosophical speculation (questioning). The poem closes on a subdued but confident reassertion of nature's healing power, even though mystical insight may be obtained from the poet.

In its successful blending of inner and outer experience, of sense perception, feeling, and thought, "Tintern Abbey" is a poem in which the writer becomes a symbol of mankind. The poem leads to imaginative thoughts about man and the universe. This cosmic outlook rooted in the self is a central feature of romanticism. Wordsworth's poetry is undoubtedly the most impressive example of this view in English literature.

Poems of the middle period

Wordsworth, even while writing his contributions to the Lyrical Ballads, had been feeling his way toward more ambitious schemes. He had embarked on a long poem in unrhymed verse, "The Ruined Cottage," later referred to as "The Peddlar." It was intended to form part of a vast philosophical poem with the title "The Recluse, or Views of Man, Nature and Society." This grand project never materialized as originally planned.

Abstract, impersonal speculation was not comfortable for Wordsworth. He could handle experiences in the philosophical-lyrical manner only if they were closely related to himself and could arouse his creative feelings and imagination. During the winter months he spent in Germany, he started work on his magnum opus (greatest work), The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind. It was published after his death.

However, such a large achievement was still beyond Wordsworth's scope (area of capabilities) at this time. It was back to the shorter poetic forms that he turned during the most productive season of his long literary life, the spring of 1802. The output of these fertile (creative) months mostly came from his earlier inspirations: nature and the common people. During this time he wrote "To a Butterfly," "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," "To the Cuckoo," "The Rainbow," and other poems.

Changes in philosophy

The crucial event of this period was Wordsworth's loss of the sense of mystical oneness, which had sustained (lasted throughout) his highest imaginative flights. Indeed, a mood of despondency (depression) descended over Wordsworth, who was then thirty-two years old.

In the summer of 1802 Wordsworth spent a few weeks in Calais, France, with his sister Dorothy. Wordsworth's renewed contact with France only confirmed his disillusionment (disappointment) with the French Revolution and its aftermath.

During this period Wordsworth had become increasingly concerned with Coleridge, who by now was almost totally dependent upon opium (a highly addictive drug) for relief from his physical sufferings. Both friends came to believe that the realities of life were in stark contradiction (disagreement) to the visionary expectations of their youth. Wordsworth characteristically sought to redefine his own identity in ways that would allow him a measure of meaning. The new turn his life took in 1802 resulted in an inner change that set the new course his poetry followed from then on.

Poems about England and Scotland began pouring forth from Wordsworth's pen, while France and Napoleon (1769–1821) soon became Wordsworth's favorite symbols of cruelty and oppression. His nationalistic (intense pride in one's own country) inspiration led him to produce the two "Memorials of a Tour in Scotland" (1803, 1814) and the group entitled "Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty."

Poems of 1802

The best poems of 1802, however, deal with a deeper level of inner change. In Wordsworth's poem "Intimations of Immortality" (March–April), he plainly recognized that "The things which I have seen I now can see no more"; yet he emphasized that although the "visionary gleam" had fled, the memory remained, and although the "celestial light" had vanished, the "common sight" of "meadow, grove and stream" was still a potent (strong) source of delight and solace (comfort).

Thus Wordsworth shed his earlier tendency to idealize nature and turned to a more sedate (calm) doctrine (set of beliefs) of orthodox Christianity. Younger poets and critics soon blamed him for this "recantation" (renouncing), which they equated with his change of mind about the French Revolution. His Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822) are clear evidence of the way in which love of freedom, nature, and the Church came to coincide (come together at the same time) in his mind.

The Prelude

Nevertheless, it was the direction suggested in "Intimations of Immortality" that, in the view of later criticism, enabled Wordsworth to produce perhaps the most outstanding achievement of English romanticism: The Prelude. He worked on it, on and off, for several years and completed the first version in May 1805. The Prelude can claim to be the only true romantic epic (long, often heroic work) because it deals in narrative terms with the spiritual growth of the only true romantic hero, the poet. The inward odyssey (journey) of the poet was described not for its own sake but as a sample and as an adequate image of man at his most sensitive.

Wordsworth shared the general romantic notion that personal experience is the only way to gain living knowledge. The purpose of The Prelude was to recapture and interpret, with detailed thoroughness, the whole range of experiences that had contributed to the shaping of his own mind. Wordsworth refrained from publishing the poem in his lifetime, revising it continuously. Most important and, perhaps, most to be regretted, the poet also tried to give a more orthodox tinge to his early mystical faith in nature.

Later years

Wordsworth's estrangement (growing apart) from Coleridge in 1810 deprived him of a powerful incentive to imaginative and intellectual alertness. Wordsworth's appointment to a government position in 1813 relieved him of financial care.

Wordsworth's undiminished love for nature made him view the emergent (just appearing) industrial society with undisguised reserve. He opposed the Reform Bill of 1832, which, in his view, merely transferred political power from the land owners to the manufacturing class, but he never stopped pleading in favor of the victims of the factory system.

In 1843 Wordsworth was appointed poet laureate (official poet of a country). He died on April 23, 1850.

For More Information

Davies, Hunter. William Wordsworth: A Biography. New York: Atheneum, 1980.

Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Johnston, Kenneth R. The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998.

Negrotta, Rosanna. William Wordsworth: A Biography with Selected Poems. London: Brockhampton, 1999.

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William Wordsworth biography

William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland. His father, John, was a lawyer, and he encouraged his five children to pursue learning. When Wordsworth's mother Anne died in 1778, young William was sent to attend grammar school away from home.

Wordsworth's father did not survive his wife by long, and when he died in 1783 the Wordsworth children found themselves living with two uncles who were not best pleased to receive them.

William was sent to Cambridge, and upon graduation he travelled in Europe for a time, but when the money ran out Wordsworth returned home. He published two poems, Descriptive Sketches , and An Evening Walk , which were not well received. However, friends arranged for money to allow him to concentrate on his writing.

In 1802 Wordsworth received money owed to his father, and he was financially secure enough to marry Mary Hutchinson, an old childhood friend. Mary, William, and his sister Dorothy lived together in the Lake District village of Grasmere .

William published a two-volume set of his poetry in 1807, and once more it was met by public indifference and scathing reviews (by Lord Byron among others).

Wordsworth's happy home life turned to tragedy when two of his four children died within a year. Shortly thereafter Wordsworth got himself appointed Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, which brought him enough money to continue writing. Although his poems were critically panned, they were gaining a wide popular readership.

In the absence of success for his poems, Wordsworth turned to travel writing. He published a travel guide to the Lake District which proved very popular.

When Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, died in 1843, Wordsworth was asked to take his place. He initially refused, pleading his advancing age, but was induced by Sir Robert Peel to take the post. He was still Poet Laureate when he died of pleurisy in 1850.

Places to see associated with William Wordsworth: Dove Cottage/Wordsworth Museum - Wordsworth's home from 1799-1808. It was here that he wrote his best poetry. Grasmere, Cumbria. Rydal Mount - Wordsworth's home from 1813-1850. Rydal, Ambleside, Cumbria. LA22 9LU. Wordsworth House , Main St, Cockermouth, CA13 9RX. In this fine georgian house Wordsworth was born in 1770.

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The Joyful Life and Legacy of William Wordsworth

The life and works of william wordsworth, table of contents.

William Wordsworth, one of the most prominent poets of the Romantic era, was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumbria, England. Throughout his life, Wordsworth explored the relationship between humanity and nature and celebrated the power of the human spirit, often using simple language and personal experiences as the basis for his poems.

William Wordsworth’s Early Life and Family

William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England, to John and Ann Wordsworth. He was the second of five children and was raised in a close-knit family. William’s father John was a lawyer, and his mother Ann was a devoted mother and homemaker. William’s older brother, Richard, died when he was just three years old, and his younger brothers, Thomas and John, and his sister , Mary, all played important roles in his life.

William’s childhood was filled with love and comfort, but it was also marked by tragedy. When William was just eight years old, his mother died of tuberculosis, and he was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School, where he formed a close friendship with Mary Hutchinson, who would later become his wife.

Early Life and Education

The loss of his mother as stated above had a profound impact on Wordsworth and is reflected in many of his later works. He was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge , where he became interested in literature and the arts.

Influence of Nature

Wordsworth’s love of nature was a central theme in his work, and it was inspired by the natural beauty he experienced during his childhood. Growing up in the Lake District, he had ample opportunities to explore the countryside, and he was struck by the power and majesty of the natural world. He saw nature as a source of solace and inspiration, and his poems often celebrate its beauty and its ability to connect people to something greater than themselves.

Early Poetic Works

Wordsworth’s first major work, “An Evening Walk” (1793), reflects his deep connection to nature and his appreciation for its beauty. He also wrote a number of other poems during this time, including “Descriptive Sketches” (1793) and “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty” (1798), which show his political views and his opposition to the French Revolution.

Lyrical Ballads

In 1798, Wordsworth published “Lyrical Ballads” with Samuel Taylor Coleridge . This collection of poems marked the beginning of the Romantic era and established Wordsworth as one of its leading figures. The poems in “Lyrical Ballads” were notable for their simple language, personal experiences, and focus on emotions. This new style of poetry was in stark contrast to the formal, intellectual verse that was popular at the time, and it marked a significant departure from the traditional forms of poetry.

The Prelude

Wordsworth’s most famous work, “The Prelude,” was written between 1798 and 1805, but was not published in its entirety until after his death. This long, autobiographical poem reflects on the poet’s life and his experiences, and it is considered one of the greatest works of English literature. In “The Prelude,” Wordsworth explores the relationship between humanity and nature, and he reflects on his own life and the events that shaped him. He writes about his childhood, his love of nature, and his political views, and he describes how these experiences shaped his understanding of the world.

Later Life and Career

In 1802, Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, with whom he had five children. He continued to write throughout his life, and his later works include “The Excursion” (1814), “Poems in Two Volumes” (1807), and “The White Doe of Rylstone” (1815). He also served as England’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

Philosophical Beliefs

Wordsworth’s philosophical beliefs are deeply woven into his poetry and reflect his views on the relationship between humanity and nature. He believed that people are capable of experiencing a deeper connection to the world around them, and he saw nature as a means of achieving this connection. Wordsworth also believed in the power of the imagination, and he saw it as a way of bridging the gap between the external world and our inner lives.

Wordsworth’s views on the importance of childhood are also evident in his works. He believed that childhood is a special time, when our minds are open to the world and our spirits are free. In his poems, he often celebrates the innocence and wonder of childhood, and he suggests that this sense of wonder is something that we can all strive to retain throughout our lives.

Literary Legacy

William Wordsworth’s influence on the Romantic era and on English literature cannot be overstated. He was one of the first poets to write about the natural world in a way that celebrated its beauty and its power to inspire, and his work inspired a generation of poets who followed him.

Wordsworth’s style, which emphasized simple language and direct, personal experiences, was a major departure from the formal, intellectual verse that was popular at the time, and it marked the beginning of the Romantic era. This new style of poetry was more focused on the emotions and experiences of the individual, and it celebrated the power of the imagination and the importance of childhood.

Wordsworth’s works continue to be widely read and admired, and they are considered some of the greatest poems in the English language. He is remembered as a pioneer of the Romantic movement and as one of the greatest poets of the 19th century.

Final Years and Death

Wordsworth’s later years were marked by illness and financial difficulties, but he continued to write and to be active in literary circles. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1843, and he held this position until his death in 1850.

Wordsworth died at the age of 80 and was buried in Grasmere, in the Lake District. He was remembered as a pioneer of the Romantic movement and as one of the greatest poets of the 19th century, and his legacy continues to inspire poets, writers, and artists to this day.

William Wordsworth was a major figure in the Romantic era and a pioneer of the new style of poetry that emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He is best known for his love of nature, his focus on emotions, and his simple, direct language. His works, including “Lyrical Ballads” and “The Prelude,” continue to be widely read and admired, and they are considered some of the greatest poems in the English language. Wordsworth’s legacy continues to inspire poets, writers, and artists to this day, and he is remembered as one of the greatest poets of the 19th century.

10 Great Questions & Answers about William Wordsworth

Who was william wordsworth.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was an English poet who was a major figure in the Romantic movement. He was one of the first poets to write about the natural world in a way that celebrated its beauty and its power to inspire, and he is best known for his love of nature, his focus on emotions, and his simple, direct language.

What is William Wordsworth famous for?

William Wordsworth is famous for his poetry, which celebrated the beauty of nature and the power of the imagination. He was a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and his works, including “Lyrical Ballads” and “The Prelude,” continue to be widely read and admired.

What was William Wordsworth's childhood like?

William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, England in 1770. He had a happy childhood, and he spent much of his time exploring the countryside and developing a deep love of nature. This love of nature would later be reflected in his poetry.

What is the significance of "Lyrical Ballads"?

“Lyrical Ballads” is a collection of poems that was published in 1798 by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This collection marked the beginning of the Romantic movement, and it was one of the first works to emphasize the importance of nature and the emotions in poetry. “Lyrical Ballads” continues to be widely read and celebrated as a landmark in English literature.

What was William Wordsworth's philosophy?

William Wordsworth believed in the power of the imagination and the importance of nature in our lives. He saw nature as a means of achieving a deeper connection to the world around us, and he believed that childhood is a special time when our minds are open to the world and our spirits are free. These beliefs are evident in his poetry and continue to inspire readers to this day.

What was William Wordsworth's style of writing like?

William Wordsworth’s style of writing emphasized simple language and direct, personal experiences. He rejected the formal, intellectual verse that was popular at the time, and instead focused on the emotions and experiences of the individual. This new style of poetry, which was more focused on the individual, marked the beginning of the Romantic movement.

What was William Wordsworth's role in the Romantic era?

William Wordsworth was a major figure in the Romantic era, and he was one of the pioneers of the new style of poetry that emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was widely read and admired during his lifetime, and his influence on the Romantic era and on English literature continues to be felt today.

What was William Wordsworth's later life like?

William Wordsworth’s later life was marked by illness and financial difficulties, but he continued to write and to be active in literary circles. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1843, and he held this position until his death in 1850.

How did William Wordsworth die?

William Wordsworth died at the age of 80, and he was buried in Grasmere, in the Lake District. He passed away peacefully after a long and productive life.

What is William Wordsworth's legacy?

William Wordsworth’s legacy continues to inspire poets, writers, and artists to this day. He is remembered as a pioneer of the Romantic movement and as one of the greatest poets of the 19th century, and his works, including “Lyrical Ballads” and “The Prelude,” continue to be widely read and admired.

Other Fascinating Facts & Info About William Wordsworth

Wordsworth’s early poetry and friendship with samuel taylor coleridge.

William Wordsworth wrote his earliest poetry while he was still at Hawkshead, and he continued to write as he traveled through Europe and visited France during the Revolution. He was particularly inspired by the works of Robert Southey, and he soon became friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he collaborated on the famous poems “Lyrical Ballads.”

Wordsworth’s poems revolved around themes of nature, human emotions, and the connection between man and the natural world. He was a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and his work was characterized by the use of simple language and a focus on emotion and feeling.

Wordsworth’s poetry was a departure from the traditional forms of poetry that were prevalent at the time, and it was met with both praise and criticism. His use of simple, everyday language and his focus on the natural world were seen by some as a slight or trivial influence, but others praised his work for its emotional depth and innovative style.

John Wordsworth, brother of William Wordsworth

John Wordsworth was the older brother of the famous English Romantic poet, William Wordsworth. Unlike his younger brother, who became known for his poetry, John pursued a career in the Church of England and was ordained as a priest in 1798. He served as the rector of Stavely, in Westmorland, for the majority of his career.

Wordsworth’s Poetry

William Wordsworth’s poetry is considered some of the most important and influential works of the Romantic era. He is known for his use of simple, everyday language to explore complex emotions and themes related to nature, childhood, and the human experience.

Tintern Abbey

“Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” is one of Wordsworth’s most famous poems and is considered a quintessential example of his poetry and the Romantic style. The poem was written during a walking tour of Europe that Wordsworth took with his sister, Dorothy, in 1798 and reflects on his experiences and the beauty of the natural world.

Dorothy Wordsworth

Dorothy Wordsworth was the sister of William Wordsworth and a close companion throughout his life. She is known for her journal entries, which provide valuable insight into the life and times of the Wordsworths, as well as her contributions to William’s poetry, including “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”

Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” also known as “Daffodils,” is one of William Wordsworth’s most famous poems and is considered a classic example of Romantic poetry. The poem reflects on the beauty of the natural world and the power of the imagination.

Famous Poems

In addition to “Tintern Abbey” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” Wordsworth is also known for other famous poems such as “The Solitary Reaper,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “The Leech Gatherer,” and “Michael.” These poems are considered important works of English Romantic poetry and continue to be studied and appreciated today.

Romantic Poetry

William Wordsworth is considered one of the great Romantic poets and his works are considered some of the most important and influential of the Romantic era. He is known for his use of simple, everyday language to explore complex emotions and themes related to nature, childhood, and the human experience.

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William Wordsworth

Biography of William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)

British poet who spent his life in the Lake District of Northern England. Wordsworth, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge , can be said to have started the English Romantic movement with their collection LYRICAL BALLADS in 1798. When many poets still wrote about ancient heroes in grandiloquent style, Wordsworth focused on nature, children, the poor, common people, and used ordinary words to express his personal feelings. His definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings arising from emotion recollected in tranquillity” was shared by a number of his followers.

“Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.” (from Lyrical Ballads , 2nd ed., 1800)

William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District. His father was John Wordsworth, Sir James Lowther’s attorney. The magnificent landscape deeply affected Wordsworth’s imagination and gave him a love of nature. He lost his mother when he was eight and five years later he also lost his father. The domestic problems separated Wordsworth from his beloved and neurotic sister Dorothy, who was a very important person in his life. Dorothy had a special connection to nature. She provided Wordsworth with a valuable source of thoughts and impressions for which he was usually given full credit.

With the help of his two uncles, Wordsworth entered a local school and continued his studies at Cambridge University. As a writer Wordsworth made his debut in 1787, when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine . In that same year he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge, from where he took his B.A. in 1791. During a summer vacation in 1790 Wordsworth went on a walking tour through revolutionary France and also traveled in Switzerland.

On his second journey in France, Wordsworth had an affair with a French girl, Annette Vallon, a daughter of a barber-surgeon, by whom he had an illegitimate daughter – Anne Caroline. The affair formed the basis of the poem ‘Vaudracour and Julia’, but otherwise Wordsworth did his best to hide the affair from posterity. After his journeys Wordsworth spent several aimless and unhappy years. In 1795 he met Coleridge. Wordsworth’s financial situation became better in 1795 when he received a legacy and was able to settle at Racedown, Dorset, with his sister Dorothy.

Encouraged by Coleridge and stimulated by the close contact with nature, Wordsworth composed his first masterwork, Lyrical Ballads , which opened with Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner.’ About 1798 he started to write large and philosophical autobiographical poem, completed in 1805, and published posthumously in 1850 under the title THE PRELUDE. The long work described the poet’s love of nature and his own place in the world order.

“Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows Like harmony in music; there is a dark Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles Discordant elements, makes them cling together In one society.”

The winter 1798-99 Wordsworth spent with his sister and Coleridge in Germany, where he wrote several poems, including the enigmatic ‘Lucy’ poems. After return he moved Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and in 1802 married Mary Hutchinson. They cared for Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy for the last 20 years of life – she had lost her mind as a result of physical ailments. Almost all of Dorothy’s memory was destroyed, she sat by the fire, and occasionally recited her brother’s poems.

Wordsworth’s second verse collection, POEMS, IN TWO VOLUMES, appeared in 1807. In the same year Thomas de Quincey met first time Wordsworth and wrote about him and other Lake Poets in several essays. He described revealingly Wordsworth’s mean appearance and Dorothy’s lack of sex appeal. The frankness of his text, although published in the 1830s and 1840s, was considered indiscreet by later Victorian critics.

“Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.” (from ‘Letter to Lady Beaumont,’ 1807)

Wordsworth’s central works were produced between 1797 and 1808. His poems written during his middle to late years have not gained similar critical approval. Wordsworth’s Grasmere period ended in 1813 when he moved to Rydal Mount. He was appointed official distributor of stamps for Westmoreland. He moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside, where he spent the rest of his life. From the age of 50 his creativity began to decline, but three female assistants took care of him, and filled his life with admiration. Wordsworth abandoned his radical faith and became a patriotic, conservative public man.

In 1843 he succeeded Robert Southgey (1774-1843) as England’s poet laureate. Wordsworth died on April 23, 1850. The second generation of Romantics, Byron and Shelley , considered him ‘dull.’ Later the philosopher Bertrand Russell summed up the poet’s career: “In his youth Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry, and had a natural daughter. At this period he was called a ‘bad’ man. Then he became ‘good,’ abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles, and wrote bad poetry.”

“… Wordsworth was of a good height (five feet ten), and not a slender man; on the contrary, by the side of Southey, his limbs looked thick, almost in a disproportionate degree. But the total effect of Wordsworth’s person was always worst in a state of motion. Meantime, his face – that was one which would have made amends for greater defects of figure.” (from Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets by Thomas de Quincey, 1907)

Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) published travel books and journals, such as GRASMERE JOURNALS 1800-03 and THE ALFOXDEN JOURNAL 1798, in which she described the friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge. After a serious illness in 1829, she was obliged to lead the life of an invalid, which deeply affected her imaginative and mental powers.

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Miscellaneous, lyrical ballads, with other poems, poems, in two volumes.

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William Wordsworth Biography and Works | Themes and Literary Awards

Table of Contents

William Wordsworth Biography and Works

William Wordsworth Biography and Works , William Wordsworth Biography and Works | Themes and Literary Awards William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was an English Romantic poet who helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, a collection of poems he co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

He is considered one of the most influential and celebrated poets in the English language, with a body of work that spans over five decades and includes some of the most beloved and widely anthologized poems in the English canon.

Early Life and Education

William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, a small town in the Lake District region of northwestern England. He was the second of five children born to John Wordsworth, an attorney, and his wife, Ann Cookson. Wordsworth’s mother died when he was only eight years old, and he was sent to live with his mother’s family in Penrith, a town about twenty miles from Cockermouth. Wordsworth’s father died when he was thirteen, and he was then sent to live with an uncle in Hawkshead, a small village in the Lake District. William Wordsworth Biography and Works

William Wordsworth Biography and Works:- Wordsworth attended Cambridge University, where he studied classics and wrote poetry. He also traveled to France, where he became fluent in French and was exposed to the revolutionary ideas of the French Revolution. Wordsworth’s experiences in France would have a profound impact on his political and philosophical beliefs and on his poetry. 

Poetic Career

Wordsworth’s early poetry was heavily influenced by the neoclassical style of the eighteenth century, but he gradually began to develop a more personal and expressive style that would become the hallmark of Romantic poetry. William Wordsworth Biography and Works, In 1793, Wordsworth published his first collection of poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, which were well-received by critics but did not receive much attention from the public.

Also Read:- William Shakespeare Biography and Works

William Wordsworth Biography and Works:- In 1795, Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he would form a close friendship and a productive literary partnership. The two poets collaborated on Lyrical Ballads, which was published in 1798 and is now considered a seminal work of English Romanticism. The collection included some of Wordsworth’s most famous poems, including “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” “We Are Seven,” and “The Tables Turned.” The poems in Lyrical Ballads broke with the conventions of eighteenth-century poetry by using ordinary language, focusing on ordinary people and everyday experiences, and exploring the emotions and inner lives of the speakers.

Mature Career

Wordsworth continued to write poetry throughout his life, and his later work is often characterized by a more reflective and philosophical tone. In 1807, he published his most ambitious work, The Prelude, an autobiographical poem that he continued to revise and expand throughout his life. The poem explores the development of Wordsworth’s consciousness and his poetic sensibility, from his childhood experiences in the Lake District to his travels in France and his encounters with the natural world.

William Wordsworth Biography and Works:- In addition to his poetry, Wordsworth was also a prolific essayist and prose writer. He wrote about a wide range of topics, including politics, nature, education, and literary criticism. His essay “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” which he wrote in 1800, is considered a manifesto of English Romanticism and a key text in the history of literary criticism.William Wordsworth Biography and Works

Late Life and Legacy

In his later years, Wordsworth became increasingly involved in politics and social reform. He served as a local magistrate and was active in the campaign for parliamentary reform. He also continued to write poetry, and his later work often reflected his political and social concerns. William Wordsworth Biography and Works

William Wordsworth Works

Please note that some of William Wordsworth’s works were published in various years, and their themes often overlap or encompass multiple aspects. The table provides a general overview of the major works and their respective publication years and themes. William Wordsworth Biography and Works

#1. Lyrical Ballads (1798)

“Lyrical Ballads,” co-authored with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a groundbreaking collection of poems that challenged the conventions of 18th-century poetry. It includes Wordsworth’s famous poems such as:

• “Tintern Abbey” – Reflects on the transformative power of nature and the lasting impact of childhood memories.
• “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (Coleridge) – A narrative poem exploring guilt, redemption, and the supernatural.

#2. “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798)

This introspective poem reflects on the restorative influence of nature on the human spirit. Wordsworth contemplates his return to Tintern Abbey after a five-year absence, marveling at the memories and sensations it evokes.

#3. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1807)

Also known as “Daffodils,” this poem celebrates the beauty of nature and the transformative effect it has on the poet’s mood. It describes a vivid encounter with a field of daffodils, emphasizing the lasting impact of nature’s beauty on the human imagination.

#4. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807)

In this reflective ode, Wordsworth explores the loss of innocence and the fading connection with the divine as one grows older. He contemplates the significance of childhood memories and the glimpses of immortality they offer.

#5. “The Prelude” (1850)

“The Prelude” is an autobiographical long poem that reflects on Wordsworth’s own experiences, emotions, and philosophical beliefs. It explores themes of memory, growth, and the development of the poet’s mind, tracing his journey from childhood to adulthood.

#6. “The Excursion” (1814)

A philosophical poem in blank verse, “The Excursion” delves into themes of nature, spirituality, and the role of the imagination in shaping human existence. It follows a group of characters engaged in a poetic dialogue about life’s deeper meanings.

William Wordsworth’s works demonstrate his deep connection to nature, his belief in the power of the individual’s experiences, and his ability to evoke profound emotions through poetic language. His poetry continues to be celebrated for its timeless relevance, vivid imagery, and the enduring beauty of his words.

#7. “The Prelude” (1850)

William Wordsworth Biography and Works “The Prelude” is an autobiographical long poem that reflects on Wordsworth’s own experiences, emotions, and philosophical beliefs. It explores themes of memory, growth, and the development of the poet’s mind, tracing his journey from childhood to adulthood. The poem is divided into several books, each focusing on different stages of Wordsworth’s life and the significant events that shaped him as a poet.

#8. “Sonnet Series”

Wordsworth wrote an extensive series of sonnets that delve into various themes, including nature, love, loss, and the passage of time. Some of the notable sonnets include “Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802,” “ London, 1802 ,” and “The World is Too Much with Us.” William Wordsworth Biography and Works | Themes and Literary Awards

#9. “The Lucy Poems”

“The Lucy Poems” is a collection of five lyrical poems dedicated to an enigmatic figure named Lucy. These poems, including “Strange fits of passion have I known” and “She dwelt among the untrodden ways,” explore themes of love, beauty, mortality, and the fleeting nature of life.

#10. “The Solitary Reaper”

“The Solitary Reaper” is a poem that captures the sublime beauty of a Scottish girl singing in a field. Wordsworth immerses himself in the enchanting scene, describing the impact of her melodic voice and reflecting on the power of music to evoke deep emotions and transcend language barriers.

#11. “Elegiac Stanzas”

“Elegiac Stanzas” is a poignant elegy composed by Wordsworth in memory of his close friend, Charles Gough. The poem reflects on the nature of grief, the fleeting nature of life, and the significance of human connections in the face of mortality.

#12. “Ode to Duty”

In “Ode to Duty,” Wordsworth explores the concept of duty as a guiding force in life. He reflects on the importance of moral responsibility and the fulfillment that comes from fulfilling one’s obligations. The poem emphasizes the virtues of steadfastness, integrity, and self-discipline in navigating the complexities of existence.

#13. “The Daffodils” (1804)

“The Daffodils,” also known as “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” is one of Wordsworth’s most beloved and widely recognized poems. It vividly describes the poet’s encounter with a field of daffodils, evoking a sense of joy, wonder, and the profound impact of nature’s beauty on the human spirit.

#14. “To a Butterfly”

“To a Butterfly” is a short and lyrical poem in which Wordsworth addresses a butterfly, marveling at its ephemeral beauty and delicate existence. The poem reflects on the fleeting nature of life and the interconnectedness of all living beings.

#15. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807)

In this depth philosophical ode, Wordsworth contemplates the loss of the spiritual connection and sense of wonder experienced in childhood. He explores the transient nature of life and grapples with the idea of the soul’s pre-existence and its ultimate reunion with a divine realm. William Wordsworth Biography and Works | Themes and Literary Awards

William Wordsworth’s works encompass a wide range of themes, from the awe-inspiring beauty of nature to the complexities of human emotions and the philosophical musings on life and mortality. His poetry captures the essence of the Romantic era and continues to captivate readers with its profound insights, lyrical language, and timeless relevance.

Themes and Style

Themes: William Wordsworth’s poetry is characterized by a deep appreciation of nature, an emphasis on the beauty of the simple and ordinary, and a celebration of the power of the human imagination. His poetry often explores the relationship between the individual and nature, the connection between the past and the present, and the role of memory and imagination in shaping our experiences.

Style: Wordsworth’s poetry is characterized by a simple, direct language that is intended to evoke a sense of immediacy and authenticity. He believed that poetry should be written in the language of everyday speech, rather than in the artificial language of traditional poetry. His poetry is also characterized by a careful attention to the details of the natural world, and by an emphasis on the sensory experience of the world.

William Wordsworth Biography and Works William Wordsworth was a best figure in English Romantic poetry and one of the most influential poet in the English language. His poetry celebrated the beauty and power of nature, explored the relationship between the individual and the natural world, and celebrated the imaginative powers of the human mind.

His simple and direct style, William Wordsworth Biography and Works | Themes and Literary Awards , use of the lyric form, and emphasis on the subjective experience of the poet have influenced generations of poets who have followed in his footsteps. Wordsworth’s legacy continues to inspire readers and writers alike, and his poetry remains an enduring testament to the power of the human imagination and the beauty of the natural world.

Q: Who was William Wordsworth?

A: William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a major English Romantic poet, known for his poems that celebrated nature, imagination, and the human spirit. He was also a key figure in the English Romantic movement, along with poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Q: What are some of William Wordsworth’s most famous poems?

A: Some of Wordsworth’s most famous poems include “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (also known as “Daffodils”), “Tintern Abbey,” “The Prelude,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” and “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”

Q: What was William Wordsworth’s writing style?

A: Wordsworth’s writing style was characterized by simple, direct language that emphasized the power of nature, the imagination, and the subjective experience of the poet. He believed that poetry should be written in the language of everyday speech, rather than in the artificial language of traditionl poetry. William Wordsworth Biography and Works | Themes and Literary Awards He also used the lyric form, which is a short, musical poem that expresses the poet’s personal feelings and emotions.

Q: What is the significance of nature in William Wordsworth’s poetry?

A: Nature was a central theme in Wordsworth’s poetry, and he believed that it had the power to heal, inspire, and reveal the divine. He often used nature as a metaphor for human emotions and experiences, and celebrated the beauty and power of the natural world in his poetry.

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• Coleridge and Lyrical Ballads

The Recluse and The Prelude

A turn to the elegiac.

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The second consequence of Wordsworth’s partnership with Coleridge was the framing of a vastly ambitious poetic design that teased and haunted him for the rest of his life. Coleridge had projected an enormous poem to be called “The Brook,” in which he proposed to treat all science, philosophy, and religion, but he soon laid the burden of writing this poem upon Wordsworth himself. As early as 1798 Wordsworth began to talk in grand terms of this poem, to be entitled The Recluse . To nerve himself up to this enterprise and to test his powers, Wordsworth began writing the autobiographical poem that would absorb him intermittently for the next 40 years, and which was eventually published in 1850 under the title The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind . The Prelude extends the quiet autobiographical mode of reminiscence that Wordsworth had begun in “Tintern Abbey” and traces the poet’s life from his school days through his university life and his visits to France, up to the year (1799) in which he settled at Grasmere. It thus describes a circular journey—what has been called a long journey home. But the main events in the autobiography are internal: the poem exultantly describes the ways in which the imagination emerges as the dominant faculty, exerting its control over the reason and the world of the senses alike.

The Recluse itself was never completed, and only one of its three projected parts was actually written; this was published in 1814 as The Excursion and consisted of nine long philosophical monologues spoken by pastoral characters. The first monologue (Book I) contained a version of one of Wordsworth’s greatest poems, “The Ruined Cottage,” composed in superb blank verse in 1797. This bleak narrative records the slow, pitiful decline of a woman whose husband had gone off to the army and never returned. For later versions of this poem, Wordsworth added a reconciling conclusion, but the earliest and most powerful version was starkly tragic.

In the company of Dorothy, Wordsworth spent the winter of 1798–99 in Germany, where, in the remote town of Goslar , in Saxony, he experienced the most intense isolation he had ever known. As a consequence, however, he wrote some of his most moving poetry , including the “Lucy” and “Matthew” elegies and early drafts toward The Prelude . Upon his return to England , Wordsworth incorporated several new poems in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), notably two tragic pastorals of country life, “The Brothers” and “Michael.” At about this time Wordsworth also wrote the brilliant lyrics that were assembled in his second verse collection, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), including the enduringly popular ““I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”” (also known as “Daffodils”). All of these poems make up what is now recognized as his great decade, stretching from his meeting with Coleridge in 1797 until 1808.

One portion of a second part of The Recluse was finished in 1806 but, like The Prelude , was left in manuscript at the poet’s death. This portion, Home at Grasmere , joyously celebrated Wordsworth’s taking possession (in December 1799) of Dove Cottage, at Grasmere , Westmorland , where he was to reside for eight of his most productive years. In 1802, during the short-lived Treaty of Amiens , Wordsworth returned briefly to France, where at Calais he met his daughter and made his peace with Annette. He then returned to England to marry Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, and start an English family, which had grown to three sons and two daughters by 1810.

In 1805 the drowning of Wordsworth’s favorite brother, John, the captain of a sailing vessel, gave Wordsworth the strongest shock he had ever experienced. “A deep distress hath humanized my Soul,” he lamented in his “Elegiac Stanzas” on Peele Castle. Henceforth he would produce a different kind of poetry, defined by a new sobriety, a new restraint, and a lofty, almost Miltonic elevation of tone and diction . Wordsworth appeared to anticipate this turn in ““Tintern Abbey,”” where he had learned to hear “the still, sad music of humanity,” and again in the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (written in 1802–04; published in Poems, in Two Volumes ). The theme of this ode is the loss of his power to see the things he had once seen, the radiance, the “celestial light” that seemed to lie over the landscapes of his youth like “the glory and freshness of a dream.” Now, in the Peele Castle stanzas, he sorrowfully looked back on the light as illusory, as a “Poet’s dream,” as “the light that never was, on sea or land.”

These metaphors point up the differences between the early and the late Wordsworth. It is generally accepted that the quality of his verse fell off as he grew more distant from the sources of his inspiration and as his Anglican and Tory sentiments hardened into orthodoxy. Today many readers discern two Wordsworths, the young Romantic revolutionary and the aging Tory humanist, risen into what John Keats called the “Egotistical Sublime.” Little of Wordsworth’s later verse matches the best of his earlier years.

In his middle period Wordsworth invested a good deal of his creative energy in odes , the best known of which is “On the Power of Sound.” He also produced a large number of sonnets , most of them strung together in sequences. The most admired are the Duddon sonnets (1820), which trace the progress of a stream through Lake District landscapes and blend nature poetry with philosophic reflection in a manner now recognized as the best of the later Wordsworth. Other sonnet sequences record his tours through the European continent, and the three series of Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) develop meditations, many sharply satirical, on church history. But the most memorable poems of Wordsworth’s middle and late years were often cast in elegiac mode. They range from the poet’s heartfelt laments for two of his children who died in 1812—laments incorporated in The Excursion —to brilliant lyrical effusions on the deaths of his fellow poets James Hogg , George Crabbe , Coleridge, and Charles Lamb .

Interesting Facts about William Wordsworth

The life of William Wordsworth told through some intriguing biographical facts

William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth in the Lake District. He went to the same school, the Cockermouth Free School, as Fletcher Christian, the man who would lead the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789. Christian was six years senior to Wordsworth.

Famously, Wordsworth had anosmia. As the poet’s nephew wrote in his  Memoirs of William Wordsworth , ‘With regard to fragrance , Mr. Wordsworth spoke from the testimony of others:  he himself had  no sense of smell . The single instance of his enjoying such a perception, which is recorded of him in Southey’s life, was, in fact, imaginary. The incident occurred at Racedown, when he was walking with Miss H––, who coming suddenly upon a parterre of sweet flowers, expressed her pleasure at their fragrance, – a pleasure which he caught from her lips, and then fancied to be his own.’

Wordsworth was a keen walker among the Lakes where he lived for much of his life – as was his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who collaborated with him on the landmark 1798 volume Lyrical Ballads. Thomas De Quincey once estimated that Wordsworth walked up to 180,000 miles in his whole life.

Who wrote the following lines? ‘They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.’ They come from ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, but they weren’t written by Wordsworth – his wife, Mary Hutchinson, contributed them, as Wordsworth himself confirmed . There is no evidence to support the oft-repeated claim that Wordsworth originally had ‘I wandered lonely as a cow’ until Dorothy advised him to alter it to ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, though it’s a nice story: the myth  may have originated in Conrad Aiken’s 1952 novel  Ushant .

‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ first appeared in print in 1807 in Wordsworth’s  Poems in Two Volumes , which received largely negative reviews. A young Byron described it as ‘puerile’. It was not, perhaps, the worst review Wordsworth’s work ever received: Francis Jeffrey’s adverse review of Wordsworth’s long poem The Excursion began with the devastating sentence, ‘This will never do.’ Which, somehow, is worse.

Wordsworth’s famous preface to the  Lyrical Ballads , in which he refers to poetry as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ that ‘takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility’, didn’t appear in the original 1798 edition but was first published in the 1800 reprint (which, for some reason, carried only Wordsworth’s name as author).

Wordsworth died on 23 April 1850 – just over a fortnight after his eightieth birthday, and on the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death some 234 years before. For the last seven years of his life he was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, though he wrote no official verses during this time.

If you enjoyed these William Wordsworth facts, do have a look at our surprising facts about Samuel Taylor Coleridge  and our fascinating facts about Sir Walter Scott .

Image: Manuscript of William Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’  © The British Library Board, Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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16 thoughts on “Interesting Facts about William Wordsworth”

Dorothy also tells us that the day of they had such an inspiring walk , the weather wasn’t so sunny and warm as it seems by reading the poem , but windy and stormy, in fact they had to go back home quickly as it rained on them. However, I agree with young Byron.

I’m sure someone has written a book relating Dorothy’s diary entries to William’s poems. She was co-author in a way!

It would be pretty interesting ! :)

I love the idea of a floating cow, however………….

Reblogged this on gunner .

I have walked in the Lake District since a child and remember studying Wordsworth at school. We even had school excursions and walked in Wordsworth’s footsteps. For fans of both fell walking AND Wordsworth I can recommend 2 books highly: Wordsworth & the Lake District – A Guide to the Poems and Their Places by David McCracken and Coleridge Walks the Fells by Alan Hankinson.

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We just covered the Romantic poets. Wandering like a lonely cow is definitely not as picturesque as a lonely cloud.

Thank you for this piece. I love William Wordsworth; his poetry is always a source of inspiration for me.

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The Eight Greatest Poems of William Wordsworth

by Charles Eager

William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in 1770—the same year as gave us Beethoven, Hegel, and Hölderlin—and died at the age of eighty, rich in the knowledge of his huge accomplishments, in Rydal Mount, Westmorland, in 1850. In those eighty years, Wordsworth brought a unique poetry to English letters and to the world; it had never before been seen, nor has it since. He spent his last couple of decades, after many years of less genial reception (see, for example, Byron’s, Shelley’s, and Keats’ responses to Wordsworth), enjoying his well-earned popularity amongst the early Victorians. He had many friends in high places, including Queen Victoria herself, and he was awarded honorary degrees by both Durham and Oxford—honours which Wordsworth responded to with dry wit in a letter to Henry Crabb Robinson (28 July 1838): ‘I forgot to mention that the University of Durham the other day by especial convocation conferred upon me the honorary degree of L.L.D. Therefore, you will not scruple when a difficult point of Law occurs, to consult me.’

Wordsworth possesses one of the most intriguing biographies of all the poets, which is itself indispensable for understanding his poetry. In his youth, for example, he was fired with the revolutionary zeal which in the 1790s—while he was in his twenties—infected so many Europeans whilst the ideals and the resentments of The French Revolution matured and, ultimately, plummeted into La Terreur . The Revolution’s bloody turn, which appalled Wordsworth, affected him for the rest of his life. Yet, like many, he remained a lover of the Rousseauan ideals which animated the early revolution. Thus, in what is perhaps his most ambitious work,  The Prelude , his poetic autobiography, he could say of the Revolutionary era, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ and also could denounce the violence and ‘atheism’ of Robespierre and the other architects of the terror. One begins to get a sense, just from the music and the longing of this single line of iambic pentameter, of how sorrow and joy beautifully intermingle in Wordsworth; they do so in a truly personal voice which ought to be the sincere envy of all us poets who cannot match that sincerity. The results often move his readers to tears.

Virgil sang “of arms and of the man”. Wordsworth sings of walks and of the man—and the man is himself. His chief works are—like Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu , or even Dante’s Commedia —explorations of the entire world by way of the self. Indeed, for these poets, the distinction between world and self is hardly relevant, since the former is to be experienced only by way of the latter, and the latter experiences nothing other than the former. In Wordsworth’s poetry, a personal voice—indeed a whole personality—comes out with incredible vividness and force. In this he is virtually the opposite of (say) Shakespeare, who banishes his own personal voice about as much as is possible in the hugely personal practice of literary creation.

Those of us who love Wordsworth’s poetry, then (and he does have his detractors, though these people I do not understand), love the man himself. So great and impressive is his soul, one almost feels he lives today with us; he is imprinted upon his surroundings; in recording them, he (in a sense) makes them for us. And he is not so much a distant, admired figure as he is a dear friend to those who love to read him and hear the music of his lines.

Wordsworth is the best kind of moralist: although obsessed with goodness, and though striving to be good, he had his faults. As well as the intellectual foolery of his early revolutionary years, he also fathered an illegitimate child whilst living in France. Thus Wordsworth might say with St. Paul, ‘I am the chief of sinners!’ But this story gives a little bit more flesh and blood to the man. Although practicality kept him from this early lover and daughter, he helped to support them financially for the rest of their lives.

So, on to the rundown of his eight greatest poems, eight being the least great, one being the finest:

8. Daffodils, or ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A poet could not but be gay, In such a jocund company: I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.

This poem is by now a bit too famous for its own good. Yet some masterpieces are so great that they will bear endless repetition without losing their effect, and I suspect that the spiritual balm of this poem’s opening lines (particularly the first) will soothe souls for as long as English is understood:

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils.

If this occasion which Wordsworth describes seems at first a little slight, he offers what is tantamount to a defence of his enthusiasm in the following stanza, where the daffodils are

Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way; They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay’.

But this is not all: if they are as numerous (and so by implication glorious) as the stars, moreover they out-perform the nearby waves in jollity:

The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee.

And if we are not yet won over to the poet’s excitement, neither (at the time) is he, since he realises only later the lasting spiritual strength which the flowers have brought him:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought:

We might wish the poet had concluded the poem with something other than those last two rather superficial lines (something which a different rhyme scheme might have helped), but the kernel that makes this poem one of Wordsworth’s very best comes in the heart of the above-quoted final stanza:

They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude.

But what, precisely, does it mean? The mystery is precisely what makes so enthralling. We all know that solitude can give bliss, but Wordsworth here offers an insight unique to him and typical of his searching descriptions of experience by making this inward eye the instrument by which we find bliss in solitude—so much so, indeed, that it in fact is the bliss of solitude. This analysis is all fine, but ultimately all we need is that beautiful nexus of inward eye, bliss, and solitude—a trinity, and a distich (i.e., any two apposite lines of poetry, not necessarily rhymed) that forcefully communicates the texture of spiritual excitement.

7. The Lucy Poems

The little sequence of Lucy poems—five short stanzaic poems on the mysterious Lucy figure—are exceptional in the works of Wordsworth. Never did he so successfully unite the compression demanded by the short lyric with the powerful impression of word and image. Although he is at his absolute greatest in the huge expatiations which we come to later in our list, in these latter he never attained the still, haunting atmosphere of the present eerie verses. The cycle, which is so interlinked as fairly to be considered a unit, consists of five short poems:

Strange fits of passion have I known: __ And I will dare to tell, But in the lover’s ear alone, __ What once to me befell.

When she I loved look’d every day __ Fresh as a rose in June, I to her cottage bent my way, __ Beneath an evening moon.

Upon the moon I fix’d my eye, __ All over the wide lea; With quickening pace my horse drew nigh __ Those paths so dear to me.

And now we reach’d the orchard-plot; __ And, as we climb’d the hill, The sinking moon to Lucy’s cot __ Came near and nearer still.

In one of those sweet dreams I slept, __ Kind Nature’s gentlest boon! And all the while my eyes I kept __ On the descending moon.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof __ He raised, and never stopp’d: When down behind the cottage roof, __ At once, the bright moon dropp’d.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide __ Into a lover’s head! ‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried, __ ‘If Lucy should be dead!’

He 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; But she is in her grave, and oh, __ The difference to me!

Travell’d among unknown men, __ In lands beyond the sea; Nor, England! did I know till then __ What love I bore to thee.

‘Tis past, that melancholy dream! __ Nor will I quit thy shore A second time; for still I seem __ To love thee more and more.

Among the mountains did I feel __ The joy of my desire; And she I cherish’d turn’d her wheel __ Beside an English fire.

Thy mornings show’d, thy nights conceal’d, __ The bowers where Lucy play’d; And thine too is the last green field __ That Lucy’s eyes survey’d.

Three years she grew in sun and shower; __ Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower On earth was never sown; __ This child I to myself will take; She shall be mine, and I will make __ A lady of my own.

‘Myself will to my darling be __ Both law and impulse; and with me The girl, in rock and plain, __ In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Shall feel an overseeing power __ To kindle or restrain.

‘She shall be sportive as the fawn __ That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; __ And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm __ Of mute insensate things.

‘The floating clouds their state shall lend __ To her; for her the willow bend; Nor shall she fail to see __ Even in the motions of the storm Grace that shall mould the maiden’s form __ By silent sympathy.

‘The stars of midnight shall be dear __ To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place __ Where rivulets dance their wayward round, And beauty born of murmuring sound __ Shall pass into her face.

‘And vital feelings of delight __ Shall rear her form to stately height, Her virgin bosom swell; __ Such thoughts to Lucy I will give While she and I together live __ Here in this happy dell.’

Thus Nature spake — The work was done — __ How soon my Lucy’s race was run! She died, and left to me __ This heath, this calm and quiet scene; The memory of what has been, __ And never more will be.

A slumber did my spirit seal; __ I had no human fears: She seem’d a thing that could not feel __ The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force; __ She neither hears nor sees; Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course, __ With rocks, and stones, and trees.

The first poem, ‘Strange fits of Passion’, is relatively unremarkable, but sets up something like a romance, a chivalric tale, in its hints of medieval tale-telling:

And I will dare to tell, But in the Lover’s ear alone, What once to me befell,

and arrives at a haunting, even terse conclusion:

‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried, ‘If Lucy should be dead!’

It is from the second, ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’, that the mystery of the ethereal ‘Lucy’ is treated:

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.

The third poem is a curious piece which I leave to the reader’s discretion as I move to the fourth. ‘Three years she grew’ is the longest of the set and relates Nature’s decision ‘to take Lucy for her own’. Being longer, it allows for slightly more complexity, and the poem shows beautiful use of enjambement and pattern. The fourth stanza begins,

The floating clouds their state shall lend To her

and the fifth,

The stars of midnight shall be dear To her.

Out of context, some of the beauty of the rhythm is lost, and I would encourage the reader to see this poem in its entirety above. But even out of context, some of the beauty of both sentiment and sonority comes through, e.g.,

Grace that shall mould the Maiden’s form By silent sympathy.

Most of the poem is occupied with the speech of Nature—too complex and protracted to delve into here—but concludes on notes of quiescence, melancholy, and absence:

Thus Nature spake—The work was done— How soon my Lucy’s race was run! She died, and left to me This heath, this calm and quiet scene; The memory of what has been, And never more will be.

Lucy seems to hover between allegory (her name means Light) and (for want of a better word) reality. The discussion of these poems among passionate Wordsworthians rages on. But the mystery which makes them so powerful remains. The final poem of the set, ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ is an excellent example of that sort of poem about which there is almost nothing to say which the poem itself does not put infinitely better. It boasts in its short space such compression, beauty, and mystery, you may profitably read it above for yourself.

6. ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’

Expostulation and Reply

“Why William, on that old grey stone, Thus for the length of half a day, Why William, sit you thus alone, And dream your time away?

“Where are your books? that light bequeath’d To beings else forlorn and blind! Up! Up! and drink the spirit breath’d From dead men to their kind.

You look round on your mother earth, As if she for no purpose bore you; As if you were her first-born birth, And none had lived before you!”

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake, When life was sweet I knew not why, To me my good friend Matthew spake, And thus I made reply.

“The eye it cannot choose but see, We cannot bid the ear be still; Our bodies feel, where’er they be, Against, or with our will.

“Nor less I deem that there are powers, Which of themselves our minds impress, That we can feed this mind of ours, In a wise passiveness.

“Think you, mid all this mighty sum Of things for ever speaking, That nothing of itself will come, But we must still be seeking?

“—Then ask not wherefore, here, alone, Conversing as I may, I sit upon this old grey stone, And dream my time away.”

The Tables Turned; An Evening Scene, on the Same Subject

Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks, Why all this toil and trouble? Up! up! my friend, and quit your books, Or surely you’ll grow double.

The sun above the mountain’s head, A freshening lustre mellow, Through all the long green fields has spread, His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife, Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music; on my life There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! And he is no mean preacher; Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to bless— Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man; Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which nature brings; Our meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms of things; —We murder to dissect.

Enough of science and of art; Close up these barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives.

These two poems, which are explicitly paired together by the poet, are perhaps not his most beautiful, but effectively constitute his poetic and intellectual manifesto in only a few quatrains. But Wordsworth’s poetry is never purely intellectual, and into these two slight poems sneak some of Wordsworth’s most beautiful and memorable lines, which secures them an easy place in a list of his greatest achievements, regardless of their size.

The first of the pairing—’Expostulation and Reply’—is, as the title suggests, a dialogue. It begins with a complaint, or, rather, a challenge submitted to Wordsworth by the fictional ‘Matthew’:

‘Why, William, on that old grey stone, Thus for the length of half a day, Why, William, sit you thus alone, And dream your time away?

‘Where are your books?—that light bequeathed To Beings else forlorn and blind! Up! Up! and drink the spirit breathed From dead men to their kind.’

A powerful criticism, we can all agree. There is so much to read; even with a thousand lifetimes you could not do it. Why don’t we all simply devote every moment to reading the myriad richnesses hidden in almost any book lying beside us? Wordsworth has an answer. He says to ‘Matthew’:

‘The eye—it cannot choose but see; We cannot bid the ear be still; Our bodies feel, where’er they be, Against or with our will.

‘Nor less I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our minds impress; That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness.’

A wise passiveness—few poets writing in English can or have matched so much beauty, calm, and simplicity in three words, and moreover in such a short line. This is Wordsworth at his simplest, and perhaps at his intellectual best. The stanza is somewhat weakened by the Wordsworthian clichés, however, of Powers which impress the mind. (To my knowledge, Wordsworth never said clearly what these are and this, as a substantial point, required a systematic prose or philosophical treatment, not verse, if they were ever to be taken seriously.) But the poem is nevertheless great, and deeply affecting—emotionally, and intellectually.

But Wordsworth should not be taken completely at his word here: he is far from against reading. Indeed, he is amongst the most literary of writers. He evidently read almost everything a learned person could read in English in his lifetime; and outside of his mother tongue he translated from the Italian of Michelangelo, the Middle English of Chaucer, and the Latin of Virgil, among other things; his defence of the sonnet (in his famous sonnet, ‘Scorn not the sonnet’) shows a poet deeply learned in the European tradition surrounding this form (in which he himself excelled most others). The next poem, ‘The Tables Turned’, continues to entertain the prospect of a bookless life—or a life with bookishness attenuated. This time he addresses a silent ‘Matthew’:

‘Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; Or surely you’ll grow double: Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble?’

Although this opening exhortation is hardly stirring, it sets perfectly the message and the rhythm of the poem. Then comes the real, substantial argument:

‘Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music! on my life, There’s more of wisdom in it’.

There is more of wisdom in nature—in general revelation—than in the special revelations of books. (The theological language is no mistake: for in the next stanza the throstle is called ‘no mean preacher’—surely a remark that gives away that Wordsworth’s ‘Matthew’ is buried in something like recondite religious scholarship.) The middle remark on the linnet and the sweetness of his music could, decontextualised, persuade me I were reading a (very good) English translation of Goethe. Wordsworth exhorts ‘Matthew’ again in one of his finest distichs:

‘Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher’,

for, he says,

‘She has a world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to bless— Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, Truth breathed by cheerfulness’.

Again the religious nature of Wordsworth’s opposition—and Romanticism sits with some of the more doom-laden aspects of Christian theology uncomfortably, to say the least—is abundantly clear: Nature blesses, and breathes, as the breath of God co-creates the cosmos in Genesis 1, or the breath of the Holy Spirit enters the Apostles at Pentecost (Acts 2). The next stanza is one of the most successful, and the most lapidary, that Wordsworth ever wrote:

‘One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.’

Perhaps it can. Beautiful and memorable though this stanza is, I myself find this position much too bookish in its following of Romantic orthodoxy. It is funny how heterodoxy becomes orthodoxy, and vice-versa. Not to mention the irony of requiring a written poem to learn this wisdom. Nevertheless, for any argumentative shortcomings, this remains fine, fine poetry. Next, Wordsworth delivers a compressed—and, for that, the more devastating—criticism of the scientific outlook:

‘Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect’.

If anything in Wordsworth rings true and timely to us today, it is that common concern in him and us for the destruction of nature by humanity, what Wordsworth himself calls elsewhere ‘the vulgar works of man’. This is the most beautiful and rigorous expression of that concern which I know. The poem then concludes on another note of exhortation, which resounds in the reader’s mind long, long, after the poem ceases to be read:

‘Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives.’

5. Hart-Leap Well

The Knight had ridden down from Wensley moor With the slow motion of a summers cloud; He turn’d aside towards a Vassal’s door, And, “Bring another Horse!” he cried aloud.

“Another Horse!”—That shout the Vassal heard, And saddled his best steed, a comely Grey; Sir Walter mounted him; he was the third Which he had mounted on that glorious day.

Joy sparkled in the prancing Courser’s eyes; The horse and horsemen are a happy pair; But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies, There is a doleful silence in the air.

A rout this morning left Sir Walter’s Hall, That as they gallop’d made the echoes roar; But horse and man are vanish’d, one and all; Such race, I think, was never seen before.

Sir Walter, restless as a veering wind, Calls to the few tired dogs that yet remain: Brach, Swift and Music, noblest of their kind, Follow, and weary up the mountain strain.

The Knight halloo’d, he chid and cheered them on With suppliant gestures and upbraidings stern; But breath and eye-sight fail, and, one by one, The dogs are stretch’d among the mountain fern.

Where is the throng, the tumult of the chase? The bugles that so joyfully were blown? —This race it looks not like an earthly race; Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone.

The poor Hart toils along the mountain side; I will not stop to tell how far he fled, Nor will I mention by what death he died; But now the Knight beholds him lying dead.

Dismounting then, he lean’d against a thorn; He had no follower, dog, nor man, nor boy: He neither smack’d his whip, nor blew his horn, But gaz’d upon the spoil with silent joy.

Close to the thorn on which Sir Walter lean’d Stood his dumb partner in this glorious act; Weak as a lamb the hour that it is yean’d, And foaming like a mountain cataract.

Upon his side the Hart was lying stretch’d: His nose half-touch’d a spring beneath a hill, And with the last deep groan his breath had fetch’d The waters of the spring were trembling still.

And now, too happy for repose or rest, Was never man in such a joyful case, Sir Walter walk’d all round, north, south and west, And gaz’d, and gaz’d upon that darling place.

And turning up the hill, it was at least Nine roods of sheer ascent, Sir Walter found Three several marks which with his hoofs the beast Had left imprinted on the verdant ground.

Sir Walter wiped his face, and cried, “Till now Such sight was never seen by living eyes: Three leaps have borne him from this lofty brow, Down to the very fountain where he lies.

I’ll build a Pleasure-house upon this spot, And a small Arbour, made for rural joy; ‘Twill be the traveller’s shed, the pilgrim’s cot, A place of love for damsels that are coy.

A cunning Artist will I have to frame A basin for that fountain in the dell; And they, who do make mention of the same, From this day forth, shall call it Hart-leap Well.

And, gallant brute! to make thy praises known, Another monument shall here be rais’d; Three several pillars, each a rough hewn stone, And planted where thy hoofs the turf have graz’d.

And in the summer-time when days are long, I will come hither with my paramour, And with the dancers, and the minstrel’s song, We will make merry in that pleasant bower.

Till the foundations of the mountains fail My mansion with its arbour shall endure; —The joy of them who till the fields of Swale, And them who dwell among the woods of Ure.”

Then home he went, and left the Hart, stone-dead, With breathless nostrils stretch’d above the spring. And soon the Knight perform’d what he had said, The fame whereof through many a land did ring.

Ere thrice the moon into her port bad steer’d, A cup of stone receiv’d the living well; Three pillars of rude stone Sir Walter rear’d, And built a house of pleasure in the dell.

And near the fountain, flowers of stature tall With trailing plants and trees were intertwin’d, Which soon composed a little sylvan hall, A leafy shelter from the sun and wind.

And thither, when the summer days were long, Sir Walter journey’d with his paramour; And with the dancers and the minstrel’s song Made merriment within that pleasant bower.

The Knight, Sir Walter, died in course of time, And his bones lie in his paternal vale.— But there is matter for a second rhyme, And I to this would add another tale.

Part Second

The moving accident is not my trade. To curl the blood I have no ready arts; ‘Tis my delight, alone in summer shade, To pipe a simple song to thinking hearts.

As I from Hawes to Richmond did repair, It chanc’d that I saw standing in a dell Three aspens at three corners of a square, And one, not four yards distant, near a well.

What this imported I could ill divine, And, pulling now the rein my horse to stop, I saw three pillars standing in a line, The last stone pillar on a dark hill-top.

The trees were grey, with neither arms nor head; Half-wasted the square mound of tawny green; So that you just might say, as then I said, “Here in old time the hand of man has been.”

I look’d upon the hills both far and near; More doleful place did never eye survey; It seem’d as if the spring-time came not here, And Nature here were willing to decay.

I stood in various thoughts and fancies lost, When one who was in Shepherd’s garb attir’d, Came up the hollow. Him did I accost, And what this place might be I then inquir’d.

The Shepherd stopp’d, and that same story told Which in my former rhyme I have rehears’d. “A jolly place,” said he, “in times of old, But something ails it now; the spot is curs’d.

“You see these lifeless stumps of aspen wood, Some say that they are beeches, others elms, These were the Bower; and here a Mansion stood, The finest palace of a hundred realms.

“The arbour does its own condition tell, You see the stones, the fountain, and the stream, But as to the great Lodge, you might as well Hunt half a day for a forgotten dream.

“There’s neither dog nor heifer, horse nor sheep, Will wet his lips within that cup of stone; And, oftentimes, when all are fast asleep, This water doth send forth a dolorous groan.

“Some say that here a murder has been done, And blood cries out for blood: but, for my part, I’ve guess’d, when I’ve been sitting in the sun, That it was all for that unhappy Hart.

“What thoughts must through the creatures brain have pass’d! To this place from the stone upon the steep Are but three bounds, and look, Sir, at this last! O Master! has been a cruel leap.

“For thirteen hours he ran a desperate race; And in my simple mind we cannot tell What cause the Hart might have to love this place, And come and make his death-bed near the well.

“Here on the grass perhaps asleep he sank, Lull’d by this fountain in the summer-tide; This water was perhaps the first he drank When he had wander’d from his mother’s side.

“In April here beneath the scented thorn He heard the birds their morning carols sing, And he, perhaps, for aught we know, was born Not half a furlong from that self-same spring.

“But now here’s neither grass nor pleasant shade; The sun on drearier hollow never shone: So will it be, as I have often said, Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.”

“Grey-headed Shepherd, thou hast spoken well; Small difference lies between thy creed and mine; This beast not unobserv’d by Nature fell, His death was mourn’d by sympathy divine.

“The Being, that is in the clouds and air, That is in the green leaves among the groves, Maintains a deep and reverential care For them the quiet creatures whom he loves.

“The Pleasure-house is dust:—behind, before, This is no common waste, no common gloom; But Nature, in due course of time, once more Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom.

“She leaves these objects to a slow decay That what we are, and have been, may be known; But, at the coming of the milder day, These monuments shall all be overgrown.

“One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide, Taught both by what she shows, and what conceals, Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.”

This is a somewhat overlooked poem which appears early in the second volume of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. It deserves much more attention since it is perhaps Wordsworth’s most successful and mature fable. It relates what Wordsworth himself calls in a headnote to the poem ‘a remarkable Chase’ (that is, a hunt) which gives the well its name. Appropriately, the poem begins in storm and tempest, but also, surprisingly, stillness:

‘The Knight had ridden down from Wensley Moor With the slow motion of a summer’s cloud, And now, as he approached a vassal’s door, “Bring forth another horse!” he cried aloud.’

The knight is later named as Sir Walter (probably not Sir Walter Scott, of whom Wordsworth was a friend). In this stanza already one begins to see the obsessions and recurring themes in Wordsworth’s work: in ‘Daffodils’ (entry 8) he ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’; here the knight rides ‘With the slow motion of a summer’s cloud’. The idea of the chivalric tale briefly appeared in the first ‘Lucy’ poem (entry 7), and here appears again in full swing. But Wordsworth is careful not to allow a bustling tale of adventure to overtake the more earnest communication of his writing. We see this in ‘the slow motion of a summer’s cloud’, and then again more forcefully in stanza 3:

‘Joy sparkled in the prancing courser’s eyes; The horse and horseman are a happy pair; But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies, There is a doleful silence in the air.’

The poem is in two discrete parts, the first of which relates the tale: Sir Walter relentlessly hunts the hart and finds it dead by a spring after leaping a tremendous distance (which he deduces from the number of hoofprints in the earth). The element of the mysterious is strongly suggested by Wordsworth himself:

‘Where is the thong, the tumult of the race? The bugles that so joyfully were blown? —This chase it looks not like an earthly chase; Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone.’

At the site of the hart’s demise, where its snout just touches the spring, Sir Walter vows to build a pleasure palace, ‘to make thy praises known’ (he tells the stag), which he shall name Hart-Leap Well. Wordsworth spends a few stanzas on a stunning description which I cannot include here, and so concludes the first part, or tale:

‘The Knight, Sir Walter, died in course of time, And his bones lie in his paternal vale.— But there is matter for a second rhyme, And I to this would add another tale.’

And Wordsworth begins the second by reminding us of his poetic seriousness, and (implicitly) his adoration of Spenser, whose influence on Wordsworth is everywhere evident, but especially here:

‘The moving accident is not my trade; To freeze the blood I have no ready arts: ‘Tis my delight, alone in summer shade, To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts.’

The style is pure Spenser. However by the second stanza he is himself again, riding ‘from Hawes to Richmond’. He comes across the site of the well and is mystified, concluding only that ‘Here in old time the hand of man hath been’. A shepherd approaches and enlightens him of the history we have just read in the first part. What he adds is that the place is now ‘curst’:

‘There’s neither dog nor heifer, horse nor sheep, Will wet his lips within that cup of stone; And oftentimes, when all are fast asleep, This water doth send forth a dolorous groan’.

The shepherd ascribes the cause to the Hart, and eulogises it movingly:

‘Here on that grass perhaps asleep he sank, Lulled by the fountain in the summer-tide; This water was perhaps the first he drank When he had wandered from his mother’s side.

‘In April here beneath the flowering thorn He heard the birds their morning carols sing; And he perhaps, for aught we know, was born Not half a furlong from that self-same spring’.

Wordsworth concludes with the shepherd that

‘This Beast not unobserved by Nature fell; His death was mourned by sympathy divine’.

The conclusion is unapologetically didactic, and one of Wordsworth’s best:

‘One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide, Taught both by what she [nature] shows, and what conceals; never to blend our sorrow or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.’

If we could take such a lesson more seriously, we might today occupy a better world than we do. But Wordsworth is wise enough (after his early revolutionary years) to know that real revolution is impossible: humanity is, for the most part, much as it is, as it has always been, as (most likely) it shall always be.

4. ‘The World is too much with us’

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for every thing, we are out of tune; It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Wordsworth always returned to the sonnet. It seems to him to have been an ideal form of expression. Whereas Ben Jonson thought the form misshaped strains of thought, making them longer or shorter than best suited them—and compared them therefore to the Bed of Procrustes—the form was to Wordsworth just large enough to elaborate, without allowing him to become prosaic, as he could often be in his longer, conversational verse, and forcing him to make his points with grace and concision. He took this well-worn love poetry form and used it for truly inventive and original ends. The Wordsworthian sonnet is a thing unto itself. There are many famous poems that could have been included in this list— ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’ , ‘ Upon Westminster Bridge ‘—as well as not so famous but beautiful works such as the Ecclesiastical Sonnets (much to be recommended), the many other ‘Miscellaneous Sonnets’, or the sonnet sequence, ‘The River Duddon’ (even more beautiful than the Ecclesiastical Sonnets): but this present poem, in warning us not to indulge too much our consuming impulses, perhaps speaks the most sharply to us today, and retains a beauty that, to my mind, will never cease to refresh a tired soul:

‘The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’

I don’t believe those first seven words, on those following, ever likely to wear thin: they speak to the very principle of weakness in us.

The turn (or volta) of this sonnet, however, into its closing sestet, moves the verse from the didactic to the Classical Wordsworth—a significant aspect of the poet too rarely seen and appreciated:

‘It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.’

It is a nice little joke, addressing the ‘Great God’ and immediately saying that one would rather be a pagan. But Wordsworth’s point here is indeed much more serious and is made more deeply and substantially in his longer Prelude, that we live ‘in a world of life’, and that it is our duty—and an incomparable pleasure—fully to appreciate this truth. To do otherwise is to beckon catastrophe.

Wordsworth wrote so many sonnets on sundry matters, which are all worth reading, such as ‘ Even as a dragon’s eye ‘, ‘ Four fiery steeds impatient of the rein ‘, the handful of sonnets translated from Michelangelo’s Italian, ‘Surprised by joy’ (which gave C. S. Lewis the title of his autobiography), ‘ Where holy ground begins, unhallowed ends ‘ (aka ‘A Parsonage in Oxfordshire’), the wonderful short sequence ‘ Personal Talk ‘, and so the list continues. Really, we are long, long overdue an edition of Wordsworth which treats his sonnets exclusively. Wordsworth the Sonneteer would have a welcome place on my bookshelf—and, I would hope, on many others’.

3. Ode: Intimations of Immortality

The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.

I. There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;— Turn wheresoe’er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

II. The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose; The moon doth with delight Look round her when the heavens are bare; Waters on a starry night Are beautiful and fair; The sunshine is a glorious birth; But yet I know, where’er I go, That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

III. Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song, And while the young lambs bound As to the tabor’s sound, To me alone there came a thought of grief: A timely utterance gave that thought relief, And I again am strong. The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep; No more shall grief of mine the season wrong; I hear the echoes through the mountains throng; The winds come to me from the fields of sleep, And all the earth is gay; Land and sea Give themselves up to jollity, And with the heart of May Doth every beast keep holiday. Thou child of joy, Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy shepherd-boy!

IV. Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call Ye to each other make; I see The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; My heart is at your festival. My head hath its coronal, The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all. Oh evil day if I were sullen While Earth herself is adorning This sweet May morning, And the children are culling On every side, In a thousand valleys far and wide, Fresh flowers, while the sun shines warm, And the babe leaps up on his mother’s arm: I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! —But there’s a tree, of many, one, A single field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone: The pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat. Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

V. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home. Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The youth, who daily farther from the East Must travel, still is nature’s priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.

VI. Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And even with something of a mother’s mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate man, Forget the glories he hath known, And that imperial palace whence he came.

VII. Behold the child among his new-born blisses, A six years’ darling of a pigmy size! See, where ‘mid work of his own hand he lies, Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses, With light upon him from his father’s eyes! See at his feet some little plan or chart, Some fragment from his dream of human life, Shaped by himself with newly-learned art— A wedding or a festival, A mourning or a funeral; And this hath now his heart, And unto this he frames his song. Then will he fit his tongue To dialogues of business, love, or strife: But it will not be long Ere this be thrown aside, And with new joy and pride The little actor cons another part, Filling from time to time his ‘humorous stage’ With all the persons, down to palsied age, That Life brings with her in her equipage, As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation.

VIII. Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie Thy soul’s immensity; Thou, best philosopher, who yet dost keep Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind, That, deaf and silent, read’st the eternal deep, Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,— Mighty prophet! seer blest! On whom those truths do rest, Which we are toiling all our lives to find, In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave; Thou, over whom thy immortality Broods like the day, a master o’er a slave, A presence which is not to be put by; Thou little child, yet glorious in the might Of heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height, Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke The years to bring the inevitable yoke, Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife? Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight, And custom lie upon thee with a weight, Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

IX. O joy, that in our embers Is something that doth live, That nature yet remembers What was so fugitive! The thought of our past years in me doth breed Perpetual benediction: not indeed For that which is most worthy to be blest— Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:— Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise; But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised: But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing; Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal silence: truths that wake, To perish never; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, Nor man nor boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy! Hence in a season of calm weather, Though inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

X. Then sing, ye birds! sing, sing a joyous song! And let the young lambs bound As to the tabor’s sound! We in thought will join your throng, Ye that pipe and ye that play, Ye that through your hearts to-day Feel the gladness of the May! What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now forever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower? We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which, having been, must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind.

XI. And O ye fountains, meadows, hills, and groves, Forebode not any severing of our loves! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; I only have relinquished one delight To live beneath your more habitual sway. I love the brooks, which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they: The innocent brightness of a new-born day Is lovely yet: The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober coloring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Though I myself happen not to love this poem half so dearly as many other Wordsworthians, it is undeniably great in its ambition and scope, and to miss it from a list of greatest poems owing to personal caprice would be much to condemn the value of the list. This Ode (another form, like the sonnet, in which Wordsworth outdid just about everyone—short perhaps of Horace and Hölderlin) gives Wordsworth’s most famous engagement with the Rousseauan idea of the natural insight and purity of the child—a doctrine which we still somewhat entertain today, even after the desecrations of Freud. Wordsworth treated this theme constantly, particularly in his early poetry, but this is his best attempt. He begins with a short epigraph to the poem which sums up his deep feelings on the matter:

‘The child is father of the man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.’

This epigraph—which Wordsworth extracted from another of his poems, ‘My Heart Leaps Up’—was added to the later, longer version of the poem (written 1804, published 1807), which is of 11 substantial stanzas in length. The first version (written 1802) is only three, and poses the problem: the fading away of the sense of the divine in nature with the coming of age:

‘There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth and every common sight, To me did seem Appareled in celestial light, The glory and freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore;— Turn wheresoe’er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.’

Despite the almost childlike simplicity of the words (save for the wonderful line, ‘Apparelled in celestial light’), It is of an aching sadness, and a beautiful sound. It also shows in its changing metres (shown in the line lengths and brought out by the rhyme) Wordsworth’s most diverse and interesting use of metre—something in which he was not tremendously adventurous. (However, most great poets—in whatever languages I can think of—tend to excel in one metre. The only exceptions I can think of are Goethe and Horace, who excelled in a variety.) The form is taken indirectly from Pindar’s Odes in Greek , though via the English versions by Cowley and Gray. However, these, and Wordsworth’s, are much more polite and clear in sense than the phenomenal complexity of metre, grammar, and subject in Pindar’s Greek.

The next two stanzas elaborate on the fading of this ‘celestial light’, though in the third, the poet cheers, concluding that, ‘No more shall grief of mine the season wrong’. Next comes the addition of 1804, making the poem 11 stanzas in length. Stanza 4 picks up the joyful measures of 3 in a way which sounds truly symphonic, and the metres get rougher and (I dare say) for all that, more exciting (no matter how much I yearn to tidy some of them into neat iambs):

‘Ye blessèd creatures, I have heard the call Ye to each other make; I see The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; My heart is at your festival, My head hath its coronal, The fullness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.’

But at that stanza’s conclusion, the sorrow persists:

‘Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’

Stanza 5 brings in a rather learned topic for Wordsworth, who usually like to wear his considerable learning much more lightly, in alluding to the Platonic (really, pre-Platonic, probably Orphic) idea of amanuesis (the pre-existent human soul’s forgetting of the divine as it enters into earthly, bodily life):

‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star Hath elsewhere had its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home’.

The argument of the remainder of this section is that the heavenly stays with us in youth, and ebbs away as we age. Again, although grand, the feeling is also a little doctrinal, and I think Wordsworth, had he wished this to be taken seriously as doctrine, ought to have adopted the systematic philosophical prose treatise. But never mind: we have a fine poem in order to recompense us of the absence of the former.

The following stanzas elaborate further on the argument. There are some lovely lines in these sections. Thereafter, stanzas ten and eleven bring us to the conclusion with the pleasant crashes of the end of a symphony:

‘Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings’;

‘Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal Silence’.

The final stanza slows the pace, adopts something closer to the organ-swell of Wordsworth’s favourite pentameter metre, as we are brought to a concluding prayer of thanksgiving:

‘Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears; To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’

2. The Prelude

Visit here to read ‘The Prelude’ in its entirety.

Around 1798–9, Coleridge began bothering Wordsworth about writing a long philosophical poem. This was to be called ‘The Recluse’. Sadly, it was never produced, but two other book-length poems were: ‘The Prelude’, published in 1850 by Wordsworth’s widow a few months after his death (the title is hers), and ‘The Excursion’, which was published in Wordsworth’s lifetime and was often considered, as the scholar Bushell notes in Re-Reading The Excursion, to be Wordsworth’s greatest poem during his lifetime. (It was appreciated by the late Victorians as equal in worth with the famous Prelude; but today it has dwindled to the point of hardly being read at all. However, Book I of the poem, first written in 1797–8 (often considered Wordsworth’s finest years) as an independent poem, The Ruined Cottage, is still read by ardent Wordsworthians.) A colleague of a colleague apparently once wittily remarked that Wordsworth couldn’t write ‘The Recluse’, but could write a Prelude to it and an Excursion from it.

It is more or less universally agreed that this book-length, autobiographical poem is Wordsworth’s greatest work. It exists in several versions. There are two book-length versions, 1805 and 1850; a five-book Prelude of 1805; and a two-part Prelude of 1799. There is also a fragment from (probably) 1798 which is effectively just the start of the two-book version of 1799. For a reader without the leisure to commit to the vast later Preludes, I would very much recommend the two-book of 1799. This is full of curious moments—including one or two that might surprise a too-narrow understanding of Wordsworth—and soaring, beautiful language and description. Needless to say, this is no substitute for the full richness of the long Preludes, so the reader might then try the five-book, or, if desiring a longer read, the full 1805 or 1850. Ernest de Selincourt, the great Wordsworthian, famously discovered, preferred, and published the more youthful and simple 1805. I think there is plenty to love in both the 1805 and the 1850, and that here we have an embarrassment of riches. Fortunately, the two versions have been put together (with the two-book 1799 Prelude and the 1798 fragment) in one affordable and attractive Penguin edition edited by Jonathan Wordsworth . The 1805 and 1850 are side-by-side, with the former on the left-hand pages, the latter on the right, so that one can choose one text, and make easy comparisons as they go.

Opening this volume, one is met with the achingly beautiful fragment which was to become the great later work:

‘Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song, And from his alder shades and rocky falls. And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice To intertwine my dreams?’

By 1805 a new beginning has fallen into place, one of Wordsworth’s most beautiful openings:

‘Oh there is a blessing in this gentle breeze That blows from the green fields and from the clouds And from the sky; it beats against my cheek, And seems half-conscious of the joy it gives.’

This vast and beautiful poem then ranges over Wordsworth’s childhood, school, university, his intellectual life, travels, life in London, France in the time of the Revolution, and concludes on a note of exaltation as Wordsworth addresses, one-by-one, his closest relatives and friends. Being a poem to Coleridge, the poem ends by addressing him, and with some of the finest lines he (or anyone else) ever wrote:

‘what we have loved Others will love, and we will teach them how; Instruct them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth On which he dwells, above this frame of things (Which, ‘mid all revolution in the hopes And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged) In beauty exalted, as it is itself Of quality and fabric more divine.’

For some background on The Prelude, I would very much recommend to any interested readers Stephen Gill’s William Wordsworth: The Prelude , a short, 100-page introduction produced for the ‘Landmarks of World Literature’ series in the 80s and 90s. It manages to be light and graceful in tone whilst remaining truly substantial and informative. Its detailing of the rather tragic Coleridge and Wordsworth relationship also makes truly moving reading—and this important aspect is almost completely absent from The Prelude itself.

1. ‘Tintern Abbey’ (with some notes on Lyrical Ballads)

“Tintern Abbey” by J.M.W. Turner

Five years have passed; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a sweet inland murmur. —Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, Which on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which, at this season, with their unripe fruits, Among the woods and copses lose themselves, Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb The wild green landscape. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, With some uncertain notice, as might seem, Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone.

_________________ Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps, As may have had no trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life; His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world Is lighten’d:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on, Until, the breath of this corporeal frame, And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

______________________ If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft, In darkness, and amid the many shapes Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart, How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee!

And now, with gleams of half-extinguish’d thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope Though changed, no doubt, from what I was, when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led; more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements all gone by,) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colours and their forms, were then to me An appetite: a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts Have followed, for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompence. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.

__________________ Nor, perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me, here, upon the banks Of this fair river; thou, my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend, and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! And this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our chearful faith that all which we behold Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain winds be free To blow against thee: and in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure, when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; Oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance, If I should be, where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence, wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came, Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love, oh! with far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake.

From Four Views of Tintern Abbey by Frederick Calbert

After a fairly ‘directionless’ youth (to quote the Stephen Gill study cited above), which Wordsworth himself described in ‘The Prelude’ as a period of ‘shapeless eagerness’, the poet eventually, at twenty-eight, published Lyrical Ballads. The short but revolutionary set of poems—and this sort of poetic revolution met Wordsworth’s ideals far better than the political revolution in France—was co-authored with Coleridge. Stefan Zweig wrote in  Der Kampf mit der Dämon  (‘The Struggle with the Daemon’) that the great minds of the Romantic age frequently suffered (and benefitted) from something like a daemonic possession. Looking at his case studies—Kleist, Nietzsche—he does seem to have a point, though I would disagree with him on his third case study, Hölderlin. Coleridge was much possessed with the daemon of opium himself, but I occasionally reflect that perhaps Coleridge was Wordsworth’s daemon. He nourished his poetry through close friendship and advocacy, but put enormous pressure on that friendship through disagreements and, ultimately fatally (for the friendship and the friend) Coleridge’s addiction.

The collection began with Coleridge’s famous ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, a curious tale in a curious attempt at balladic form and stress-based metre. It then cycled through a number of ballads and ballad-like poems celebrating the common humanity of what we might call ‘low’ characters—a reaction to the heroic tradition of the eighteenth century. (However, let me emphasise that this cliché is far from the total truth. Wordsworth read copious amounts of eighteenth-century poetry, and there is much of the style of the time—albeit deeply transformed—in his writing, too. For this side of Wordsworth, read ‘An Evening Walk’, or the wonderful ‘Descriptive Sketches’.)

The Lyrical Ballads of 1798 was a revolutionary book, and contained one of the entries here (no. 6). It enjoyed a quiet early life, and was republished in 1800 with a huge Preface by Wordsworth in which he laid out many of his deep convictions and insightful observations on what the art of poetry is, has been, and what it ought to be. The collection was now almost double its original size, consisting now of two volumes, and many more fine poems were added as a result of Wordsworth’s fury of compositional energy in those years. There are many fine examples in the later edition that are not as well known, such as ‘Hart-Leap Well’, which we have included in this list.

Although full of great moments, Lyrical Ballads’ apex (in both editions) is Wordsworth’s great ode in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), ‘Tintern Abbey’ (or, to give it its full original title, ‘Lines, written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’). The Abbey—that is, the place itself—is on the Welsh border. Wordsworth had seen it and its surrounding landscape five years before he wrote the poem and, on revisiting, transmuted his deep feelings on the place into this ode, which is addressed to his beloved sister, Dorothy. I am not alone in thinking this the greatest lyric poem in English. Nor am I alone in being unable to read it without tears:

‘Five years have passed; five summers, with the length Of five long Winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur.’

There is in the lines of this Ode a moving, quiet music, which Wordsworth was never to match again, great though his later achievements were. The weaving together of the landscape description and its psychological effect remains unmatched:

‘Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky.’

‘Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!’

From these beautiful descriptions, Wordsworth departs into a meditation on the benison which such scenes are to the memory:

‘These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration:—feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.’

But this is not the only beneficent influence which the poet has enjoyed; there has been something even deeper than this:

‘Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessèd mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.’

There are not really any words, to my mind, adequate to praise these lines justly. Let us move on therefore. After a few more fine lines, the poem returns to the theme we have seen in the Prelude and the ‘Intimations’ Ode—the loss that comes with growth, and the coattendant sense of some consolation which remains, to make quiet the gentle sorrow:

‘And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarse pleasures of my boyish days And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was.’

Often, Wordsworth’s best poetry proves to be found in those moments in which he fails to say exactly what he wants; in his best work there is a sense of endless yearning and striving. It is dear, and it is tragic. Here he cannot paint what he then was, and so returns to a description of nature’s effect upon him, as if to say, that he and nature, existing so closely, are one. Of course he cannot adequately describe himself: to do so would be to describe nature exhaustively too! Perhaps his most beautiful description of his boyhood pleasure in nature follows, which I shall leave to the reader’s private delectation. For we must move on with the change of the poem’s subject:

‘That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense.’

And here we move on to the wisdom of age:

‘For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity, Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue.’

These last three lines are surely amongst the greatest written by anyone—at least in English. But Wordsworth must always add a sense of the spiritual and sublime to his humane insights, and so follows the impressive passage:

‘And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.’

Again, this is Wordsworth at his most doctrinal: it is at once the most impressive and least beautiful, because we can find so many objections to its argument for beauty. It is, again, that striving, unsubdued idealism of Wordsworth—exclusive, grand, unreal—and he will go on to address this very objection in a short space in the poem. But for this verse paragraph he is to conclude that he is

‘well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.’

The most beautiful, and tear-provoking, moment in the poem comes now, as Wordsworth turns to address his silent sister Dorothy:

‘Nor, perchance, If I were not thus taught, should I the more Suffer my genial spirits to decay: For thou art with me, here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes.’

Loaded with such a sense of due thanksgiving, and weighed with such reflections as we have seen, Wordsworth then makes a prayer to Dorothy:

‘and this prayer I make, Knowing that nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgements, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our chearful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings.’

Stunningly beautiful though this is, it is as nothing but prelude to what comes next. He continues his words to Dorothy:

‘Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and in after-years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations!’

The final words of the prayer conclude the poem:

‘Nor, perchance— If I should be where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence—wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake!’

Conclusion, and a note on editions of Wordsworth.

Wordsworth’s corpus is vast, and made doubly vast again by the fact that he substantially revised most of what he wrote at some point in his life. Though many editors prefer Wordsworth’s earliest versions, thinking them ‘better’ (hardly a rigorous criterion for such an important decision!), I go with Wordsworth’s own opinion, which he expressed in a letter to the scholar and editor Alexander Dyce, ‘you know what importance I attach to following strictly the last Copy of the text of an Author’ (19 April 1830). Wordsworth re-wrote and, more importantly, re-thought throughout his life. Of course we need every version he ever made to be on record. But, for reading, I would err towards his latest version first. Taken with these, we are then free to explore the earlier versions if it pleases us to do so.

So, you may wonder, what edition of Wordsworth to read? I am afraid that neither the poet nor the reader is terribly well-served by the available modern editions. However, both editions of Lyrical Ballads (1798, and the much expanded 1800) have been issued in one attractive paperback volume, published by Oxford University Press, and this makes a beautiful, manageable way to begin with the young Wordsworth. However it does only give the young Wordsworth, and I might say for that reason that it is better employed as a volume for someone who already knows his general works since, replete with great poems as Lyrical Ballads is, certain aspects of it may weary the new reader, if he or she does not already have a firmer picture of Wordsworth’s career and his future greatness in mind.

I should like to warn readers away from Oxford’s Wordsworth: The Major Works, edited by Stephen Gill. Although Gill is a great Wordsworthian, as I have implied above, this huge and partial (in both negative senses of the word) edition is not worth the time, effort, or money.

There is an attractive hardback Selected Poems from Everyman ; at some 500 pages with a few interesting-looking post- and prefatory essays, it offers an curious, affordable option: most of the major poems are here (with extracts from the long 1805 and 1850 Preludes), and some less well-known but interesting pieces besides. It is a substantial, curious, but partial Wordsworth which this volume offers.

The late Seamus Heaney’s selection of Wordsworth’s verse is more like a gift book: spare, slim—it would suit only the most cursory of investigations into the man’s works, but may be a suitable preliminary for busy people who do not have time to delve into the vast corpus.

In short, modern editions usually waste space on scholarly notes and painstaking notation of Wordsworth’s many substantial revisions—things about which no one but a Wordsworth scholar could possibly care. If there is any poet who has no need of these annotations, it is Wordsworth, the supreme poet of feeling. He is almost completely free of that poetic compulsion (dare I say it, vice) to seem clever, and so hardly ever requires an explanatory note in order to acquire at least a basic understanding of his meaning.

The effect of these gratuitous annotations is that these editors have to leave out the so-called ‘minor works’, making their modern editions weighty, tediously-annotated editions of the ‘greatest hits’. However, George Eliot made the point very well when she wrote: ‘I prefer Moxon’s one-volumed edition of Wordsworth to any selection. No selection gives you the perfect gems to be found in single lines, or in half a dozen lines, which are to be found in the “dull” poems’.

Perhaps the best option then is to search the second-hand market for a good old edition of Wordsworth, from the days when he was understood with a much more general sympathy. I do not know Eliot’s Moxon edition, but since Moxon was a contemporary and friend of Wordsworth, such editions are likely to be very old, rare, and expensive. For this essay I was greatly helped by that of Thomas Hutchinson (1904), revised by Ernest de Selincourt (1936)—although I was not assisted by the missing pages 459–62 which I hope is a feature unique to the copy from Leeds University Library! Generally though, the older you go, the better, and I would have used the unrevised Hutchinson of 1904 if I could.

Charles Eager is a scholar, teacher, and poet in Yorkshire, England. He is co-author of the poetry volume Synkronos (2017) with Vlad Condrin Toma. Although sold-out, it is available to be read freely online. His poetry has been published by EPIZOOTICS! and The Society of Classical Poets. His coming projects include a book on Shakespeare’s gods; books on Wordsworth and Dickens’s religion; compositions for classical guitar; a book on distinctions; and poetry, translated and original. @sircharleseager [email protected]

Online Resources

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9622/9622-h/9622-h.htm

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lyrical_ballads/Volume_2/Hart-leap_Well

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8912/pg8912-images.html

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32459/32459-h/32459-h.htm

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30235/30235-h/30235-h.htm

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13 Responses

Your exposition is masterful, and you exposed me to much more Wordsworth than I was familiar with. As a man who has planted thousands of daffodil bulbs in his gardening career, I am not unhappy that you esteem his poem on that subject above so many others. I’m rather sure that some of those bulbs I planted will outlive my own modest contribution to the canon of English/American poetry.

Many thanks, Mr Anderson, for your kind words, by which I am very touched. Bulbs or poems,—both leave the world a better place! Charles

These masterful poems remind us how much words are worth.

Very much agreed!

Your exposition is scholarly and reasoned. From your detailed comments, I learnt more fine detail of Wordsworth’s character and poetry than I previously knew.

Many thanks for your kind words, David. I am very glad you found the essay enlightening! Charles

In my opinion this is the finest essay on any subject I have yet read on the SCP site. The inclusion of the Lucy and Hart-Leap Well poems, although unexpected, was well justified as illustrating the broad range of Wordsworth’s vast poetic output. While embracing Wordsworth as the greatest English poet of his age I have, however, always stumbled over the recurring awkwardness in his use of rhyme. In Tintern Abbey, however, Wordsworth sidesteps the rhyme entirely and gives us the greatest, most lyric and rhapsodic example of Romatic poetry in the English languag—period. Mr. Eager’s exposition of this poem is particularly erudite and enlightening. The only thing that would improve the essay would be to cap the list at 7 and leave Daffodils off entirely.

Many thanks, Mr Tweedie, for your kind and thoughtful words. I generally agree with you on Wordsworth’s use of rhyme (and his choice not to use it), although certainly he enjoyed notable successes with it, too. I am very glad you found my discussion of the great Tintern Abbey profitable; the peak of Wordsworth’s writing, and the peak of my writing about Wordsworth! As for Daffodils, we shall have to be content to disagree, but I find myself wishing that if only Wordsworth had written a little poem entitled ‘Scorn not the daffodil’, I might then have used it to make a case! Charles

We are given those words above all in God’s Word. Given to Wordsworth is God’s gift to mankind. Beautiful thoughts without the lust of the eyes or flesh. No pride that life is worst for it……

I’d love to see his poem on James Hogg’s death here.

Which poem of William Wordsworh would be suitable to write an academic research paper? Theme: A model poem to teach English Language skills through integrated approach

Samy, I recommend “Daffodils.” This lesson plan may interest you: https://classicalpoets.org/2019/03/18/poetry-lesson-plan-british-romantic-period-including-lecture-notes/

The teacher covers “Daffodils” in depth and how it relates to the overarching themes of the Romantic Period, and then students are given the below Wordsworth poem for the first time on the test and asked to analyze how it reflects the Romantic Period themes (or dichotomies).

Lines Written in Early Spring by William Wordsworth, written and published in 1798

I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sat reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower, (primrose: type of flower / bower: pleasant shady place) The periwinkle trailed its wreaths; (periwinkle: soft bluish violet flower) And ’tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played, Their thoughts I cannot measure— But the least motion which they made, It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan, To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent, If such be Nature’s holy plan, Have I not reason to lament (lament: mourn) What man has made of man?

Dear Evan, Frank, Joshua, Mike, Connie, C.B., Dusty, Daniel, Michael, Damian, James and Joseph

RE: THE DISTAFF In ancient times, spinning was regarded as a sacred skill.

“To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.”

What came to mind in the first two lines is … life with the distaff.

What came to mind in the last two lines is … life without the distaff.

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William Wordsworth

Introduction.

William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cumberland, England . His parents died before he was 14 years old. Wordsworth and his three brothers and sister were split up to live with different relatives. He wrote poetry while he was at school and took a keen interest in the natural world. Wordsworth particularly enjoyed playing outdoors in the beautiful Lake District of northern England.

Early Career

In 1787 William Wordsworth went to Cambridge University but was not happy there. He spent one summer holiday in France . This was the time of the French Revolution and Wordsworth was greatly affected by the politics he learned there.

Back in England Wordsworth grew concerned with the unfairness of English society. He was distressed by the sight of people living in great poverty. His poetry from this time concentrates on these social issues.

In 1795 a friend gave Wordsworth some money that allowed him to be reunited with his sister Dorothy. Two years later they moved to Bristol. There they became friends with another poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth and Coleridge began working together. The poets inspired one another, and Wordsworth started to write the short, dramatic poems for which he is now best remembered.

Wordsworth and Coleridge produced a book of poetry, called Lyrical Ballads . The book contained poems written in a new and exciting way. They told stories of real people in a way that ordinary people would understand. Many of these poems were linked to themes of nature. The book was published in 1798 and is regarded as the beginning of the movement known as Romanticism in British poetry. Romantic works focused on emotions rather than reason. They also celebrated nature and the fantasy world of the imagination.

In 1799 Dorothy and William Wordsworth moved to Dove Cottage in Grasmere, in the Lake District. He wrote many of his best works there.

Later Years

William Wordsworth married a childhood friend in 1802. His poems took on a new tone after his favorite brother died in 1805. Some of the most memorable of his later poems were about the deaths of two of his children and several of his friends. He continued to write poetry. However, none of it was as successful as the poems he had written when he was younger.

In 1843 Wordsworth became poet laureate, the highest honor that can be granted to a poet in Britain. He died on April 23, 1850.

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William Wordsworth

A short biography of william wordsworth, william wordsworth as a poet, developing poetry, philosophy, and death, william wordsworth’s writing style.

Luckily the splendid imagination of William Wordsworth was repeatedly excessively influential for his principle, and he unintentionally overlooks it completely in his best works.

Works Of William Wordsworth