William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth is the founding poet of English Romanticism and one of the most influential poets in the language. With Samuel Taylor Coleridge he published Lyrical Ballads (1798), a slim anonymous volume that announced a revolution in subject and style: poems about ordinary rural people in ordinary language, and poems of the mind’s communion with nature. Its preface (1800) defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and the poet as “a man speaking to men”. His great works — “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, the sonnets and lyrics of Poems in Two Volumes (1807), and the autobiographical epic The Prelude — explore how nature, memory and imagination shape a human mind. He made the inner life of an ordinary man — his own — the subject of epic poetry.

Life

Childhood in the Lakes

Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 at Cockermouth in Cumberland, in the north-west of England, the second of five children of John Wordsworth, legal agent to the powerful Sir James Lowther. His mother died when he was nearly eight and his father when he was thirteen, leaving the children orphans and in financial difficulty, since Lowther refused to pay the large sum he owed their father. The children were split up; William’s beloved sister Dorothy was sent to relatives and he did not see her for nine years.

He was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School in the Lake District, lodging with a kindly old woman, Ann Tyson, and roaming freely over the hills and lakes — skating, bird’s-nesting, rowing, climbing crags. These years, recalled in The Prelude, gave him his deepest experiences: moments of fear, exaltation and mysterious communion with the natural world.

Cambridge, France and revolution

At St John’s College, Cambridge (1787–91), he was an indifferent student. In the summer of 1790 he and a friend walked across France and through the Alps at the height of the Revolution’s first joy. After graduating he returned to France (1791–92), was converted to revolutionary politics by the republican officer Michel Beaupuy, and fell in love with Annette Vallon, a surgeon’s daughter in Orléans, who bore his daughter Caroline in December 1792. Lack of money and the outbreak of war between Britain and France in 1793 forced him home; he did not see them again for ten years. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” he wrote of the Revolution’s early days; but the Terror, Britain’s war against France, and France’s turn to conquest brought him to a moral crisis. For a time he embraced the rationalist philosophy of William Godwin; then, he says in The Prelude, “Yielded up moral questions in despair.”

Dorothy and Coleridge

Recovery came through his sister and through nature. A legacy in 1795 allowed William and Dorothy to set up house together, first at Racedown in Dorset and then at Alfoxden in Somerset, near Nether Stowey, where Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived. The friendship of 1797–98 between the two poets was one of the most fruitful in literary history. They walked and talked daily; a government spy was sent to watch them, suspecting French sympathisers, and reported that they talked of “Spy Nosy” (Spinoza). Out of their collaboration came Lyrical Ballads (1798), opening with Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and closing with Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”. Dorothy’s journals — vivid, precise records of weather, flowers and people — fed her brother’s poems; Coleridge called her “his exquisite sister”.

That winter the three went to Germany. In the cold, lonely town of Goslar, Wordsworth began writing about his childhood — the poem that became The Prelude — and wrote the mysterious “Lucy” poems about a girl who dies (“A slumber did my spirit seal”).

Grasmere

In December 1799 William and Dorothy settled at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, in the heart of the Lake District, where he wrote his greatest poems. In 1802, after visiting Annette and Caroline in France during a lull in the war, he married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend; they had five children, two of whom died in 1812. The household moved to larger houses, finally Rydal Mount (1813), where he lived the rest of his life.

The years 1797–1807 were his great decade. Poems in Two Volumes (1807) contains “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (the daffodils), “Resolution and Independence”, the “Immortality Ode”, “The Solitary Reaper”, the sonnet “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” (“Earth has not anything to show more fair”) and “The world is too much with us”. He finished the thirteen-book Prelude in 1805 but kept revising and did not publish it.

The later years

His friendship with Coleridge broke down in 1810 amid Coleridge’s opium addiction and a hurtful remark reported to him; they were partly reconciled later. Wordsworth’s politics grew conservative: he opposed Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform and accepted a government post as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland (1813). The younger Romantics — Byron, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt — mocked or lamented the turncoat; Browning’s “The Lost Leader” (1845) is about him: “Just for a handful of silver he left us.” His later poetry, including The Excursion (1814), is widely thought inferior. But his fame grew steadily; he was given honorary degrees and a civil-list pension, and in 1843 succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate, on condition that he need write no official verse. He died on 23 April 1850 — Shakespeare’s birthday — and is buried in Grasmere churchyard. The Prelude was published three months later.

Lyrical Ballads and the Preface

The 1798 volume was a deliberate experiment. Wordsworth and Coleridge divided the work: Coleridge would write about supernatural subjects, making them feel real; Wordsworth would take ordinary subjects and “give the charm of novelty to things of every day”, making them wonderful. Wordsworth’s poems — “The Thorn”, “The Idiot Boy”, “Simon Lee”, “We Are Seven”, “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” — told of rural poor people, the old, children, the mad and the abandoned, in a deliberately simple ballad style that many readers found ridiculous.

The Preface to the second edition (1800, expanded 1802) is one of the great manifestos of English poetry. Wordsworth attacked the “gaudiness and inane phraseology” of eighteenth-century poetic diction and proposed:

to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men… Low and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity.

And he defined poetry:

all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

The poet is “a man speaking to men”, but one “endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness”.

Tintern Abbey

“Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798” is the poem in which Wordsworth found his great theme. Returning after five years to a valley in the Welsh borders, he reflects on what the memory of the landscape has meant to him in the meantime — in “lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din / Of towns and cities” it brought “sensations sweet, / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart”, and a mood in which “we see into the life of things”. He traces three stages of his relation to nature: the boy’s animal delight, the youth’s passionate, unreflecting love (“The sounding cataract / Haunted me like a passion”), and the man’s mature, thoughtful awareness:

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… 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.

Nature is “the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being.” The poem ends by turning to his sister, in whose “wild eyes” he sees his former self, and blessing her.

The Prelude

The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind is Wordsworth’s masterpiece — an autobiographical poem in blank verse, written as an address to Coleridge, intended as the introduction (“prelude”) to a vast philosophical poem, The Recluse, that he never completed. It exists in a two-book version (1799), a thirteen-book version (1805) and a fourteen-book version (1850). It is the first great poem in English whose subject is the poet’s own development, and a founding text of modern autobiography and psychology.

It traces his life from infancy through his schooldays in the Lakes, Cambridge, the Alps, London, France and the Revolution, to his crisis and recovery. Its most famous passages are the “spots of time” — moments of childhood experience, often involving fear or guilt, that remain charged with a “renovating virtue” by which “our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired”. The boy steals a boat at night on Ullswater and rows out, until a huge peak seems to rise up and stride after him, and “for many days, my brain / Worked with a dim and undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being”. He snares woodcocks and hears “low breathings coming after me”. He skates on the frozen lake, the cliffs wheeling by. He comes upon a gibbet where a murderer was hanged, and sees a girl with a pitcher on her head struggling against the wind. Crossing the Alps by the Simplon Pass, he learns from a peasant that they have already crossed without knowing it — and the disappointment becomes an epiphany of the Imagination, “that awful Power” rising “from the mind’s abyss”. The poem ends with an ascent of Snowdon by night, when the moon breaks through above a sea of mist — an image of “a majestic intellect” brooding over the world.

The Immortality Ode

“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1802–04) begins with loss: “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream… To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light”, but “The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” Wordsworth answers with a Platonic myth of pre-existence: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting… trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” As we grow up, “Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy”, and the vision fades “into the light of common day”. Yet the adult can find consolation in “the philosophic mind”, in sympathy with human suffering, and in memory: “To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

Shorter poems

Wordsworth was also a master of short forms. The Lucy poems (“She dwelt among the untrodden ways… But she is in her grave, and oh, / The difference to me!”) are among the most quietly devastating lyrics in English. He revived the sonnet, writing over five hundred: “Composed upon Westminster Bridge”, seeing London asleep at dawn; “London, 1802” (“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: / England hath need of thee”); “The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”. “I wandered lonely as a cloud”, based on Dorothy’s journal entry about daffodils by Ullswater, ends with the poet on his couch “in vacant or in pensive mood”, when the daffodils “flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude”. “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky” gave the phrase “The Child is father of the Man”.

Ideas

Nature. Wordsworth’s nature is not scenery but a moral and spiritual power, a “presence” that educates through beauty and fear. Critics have debated whether this is pantheism, a version of Spinoza, or Christian natural theology; his later revisions made it more orthodox.

Memory. For Wordsworth, poetry depends on memory: emotion is “recollected in tranquillity”; the “spots of time” nourish the adult mind. He is the great poet of the relation between past and present selves.

Imagination. The mind is not passive but “creator and receiver both”; in The Prelude imagination is “but another name for absolute power / And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And Reason in her most exalted mood”.

The ordinary and the humble. His sympathy for the poor, the old, the outcast and the mad — the leech-gatherer, the old Cumberland beggar, the discharged soldier — made the dignity of common people a subject of serious poetry.

Legacy

Wordsworth transformed English poetry. Keats called his genius the “egotistical sublime”; Shelley parodied him; Byron mocked him; Hazlitt, in The Spirit of the Age, said his muse was “a levelling one”. Yet John Stuart Mill, recovering from a breakdown in 1828, found in Wordsworth’s poems “a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure”, and the Victorians revered him. Matthew Arnold ranked him third among English poets after Shakespeare and Milton. His idea of nature shaped the conservation movement — he opposed the railway into the Lake District, and the National Trust grew partly from his vision. Modernists reacted against his self-absorption, but his influence persists in every poem that finds significance in ordinary experience, memory and landscape.

In conversation

• “Emotion recollected in tranquillity” — how poetry (or any reflection) transforms experience.
• “The Child is father of the Man” — our childhood shapes who we become.
• “The world is too much with us” — the complaint against busy, materialistic life.