William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth 1770-1850
Evert A. Duyckinick's 1873 reproduction
of a 1839 watercolor by Margaret Gillies.
Image Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries,
The University of Texas at Austin.

William Wordsworth:

1,295 Words’ Worth of Biographical Information

    These lines from “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” illustrate the affinity that the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth had for nature and its connection to the free human spirit. Wordsworth, a product of the changing globe of the eighteenth century, began life as a carefree child in awe of the natural world. This love of his surrounding environment translated into an incredible burst of creativity in the second and third decades of his life. Wordsworth then managed to attain more prestige as he associated himself with the most prominent Romantic thinkers of the era, and his success culminated in his winning of the position of Poet Laureate towards the end of his years.

     Wordsworth’s childhood supplied him with the experiences that provide the basis for many of his ideas that surfaced in poems written years later. Born in 1770 in the Lake District of England, William was the son of John Wordsworth and his wife Anne Cookson Wordsworth. His birth came at an interesting time. Though a fascination with freedom from the constraints of rules and order characterized much of Romanticism’s preoccupation with the French Revolution and a return to nature, the industrialization of Europe posed a threat to the Romantic idea of leaving the town behind for a more pastoral life. Nevertheless, Wordsworth’s home in the Lake District allowed him to connect with nature, and the nearby decrepit Cockermouth Castle was the perfect playground for the young man whose ideals would later come to identify with the Romantic ones that often spoke of crumbling edifices that represented a departure from the order and reason of a stratified society. William loved to play in the beautiful surrounding area, and he had to look no further in his search for a companion to explore with than his sister Dorothy. He was very attached to her; their future walking tours throughout Europe were the inspirations for many of his greatest works. Unfortunately, the death of William’s mother when he was only eight years old left his father so distraught that William and his brothers were forced to spend most of their time with their rather unpleasant maternal grandparents while Dorothy was sent to live with relatives in Halifax. William was not able to see his sister for nine years; however, in the Hawkshead Grammar School he found some happiness despite her absence. He eventually left the boarding school in favor of Cambridge, yet the setting of the new school was no match for the Lake District’s vast natural expanse.

    The next stage of William’s life began an explosion of creative talent that manifested itself in some of Wordsworth’s greatest poems. The French Revolution, begun when he was a mere nineteen years of age, interested Wordsworth. He eventually traveled to France, yet his decision to simply go on walking tours of that country as well as Switzerland show that nature – not the wave of societal change sweeping through Paris – still had a grip on William. Instead of political philosophies he sought out waterfalls on this first of many treks throughout Europe. During his time in France he also met and fell in love with a young woman named Annette Vallon. He fathered a daughter, Caroline, before he returned to England to try to raise funds to bring Annette there with him. The Reign of Terror, however, prevented him from going back to France for quite some time, so he focused on the formulation of his Romantic ideas while in his home country. He kept the company of many other famous Romantics, and through them he sought to define his own ideas. He considered himself a strict democrat, and he read William Godwin’s works in order to better understand this idea of governance. However, he illustrated his interest in the untamed natural world when he disagreed with Godwin’s fascination with reason in government. Wordsworth also had a deep respect for Godwin’s wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died in 1797. He read Godwin’s memoir of Mary’s life in 1798, and he was so stricken by the loss of such a powerful embodiment of the Romantic woman that he offered up a sizeable amount of money to help pay for the upbringing of her daughter, Mary Shelley. Turning his focus back to nature and poetry, William soon gained not only his old friend Dorothy but a new one in Samuel Taylor Coleridge; through these companions he was able to contemplate and refine his philosophy of life. William, Dorothy, and Samuel embarked on a walking tour of England in 1797 that served as the inspiration for many famous poems and shows how Wordsworth and Coleridge worked together as Romantic-era poets and friends. The two poets played to each other’s strengths. Coleridge wrote much of his Rime of the Ancient Mariner during this time using his own ideas because Wordsworth felt himself unworthy of conceiving supernatural poems, and even though Coleridge would have liked to write a poem such as Wordsworth’s beginnings of The Recluse, he decided that William was better at writing philosophical ideas in verse. The journey spawned the poems that would become the Lyrical Ballads, a compilation of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poems that includes “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” – a poem that idealizes the raw beauty of untamed nature. This collaboration launched Wordsworth into a career of writing some of the finest poetry of the era.

     Following Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth began a lengthy work meant to be an autobiographical sketch of his own mind, entitled The Recluse. He began an untitled appendix to this work that he simply called a “poem to Coleridge”, and the composition slowly morphed into one of his most famous poems: The Prelude. This long composition of blank verse, though finished in 1805, was not published until after Wordsworth’s death in 1850. It was intended to be part of the much larger three-part The Recluse, of which William had barely scratched the surface. He had dealt with numerous familial changes, including his marriage to Mary Hutchinson in 1802, the birth of five children (two of whom died in 1812), and the death of his brother in 1805. All of these events served to inspire his poetry that reflected the grief he felt, and in 1814 he published the second part of The Recluse: The Excursion. This was the last installment of his epic that he would complete. Thus, Wordsworth – despite creating an epic description of his own experience in life that is now regarded as his finest creation – never quite finished his intended ambitious project.

     Wordsworth’s later life involved numerous honors in the face of a few more personal tragedies. He became the Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland as well as the Poet Laureate in 1843 upon Robert Southey’s death; however, he suffered from the mental collapse of Dorothy as well as the 1847 death of another of his children. Wordsworth died in 1850 at the age of 80 as a man who had been belatedly bestowed honors for his work as a young man. Many felt that his peak poetic ability came during his travels with Coleridge, yet his works took quite some time to be recognized as great. Nevertheless, Wordsworth was a true Romantic thinker in awe of the beautiful unruliness of nature, and he established the standard for reflective, nostalgic, and philosophical poetry for years to come.

- by Aidan Gillespie
 

References

Barker, J. R. V. In Wordsworth : a life; Viking: London ; New York, 2000.
Gordon, L. In Vindication : a life of Mary Wollstonecraft; HarperCollins: New York, 2005.
Halliday, F. E. In Wordsworth and his World; House of Stratus: New York, 2001.
Jacobus, M. In Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference : Essays on the Prelude; Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press: Oxford; New York, 1989.
Wordsworth, W.  In The Essential Wordsworth, The Essential Poets; ed. S. Heaney. Ecco Press; New York, 1988; Vol. 6.