William Wordsworth

gigatos | February 17, 2022

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Summary

William Wordsworth (Cockermouth, April 7, 1770 – Rydal Mount, April 23, 1850) was a British poet.

Together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge is considered the founder of Romanticism and especially of English naturalism, thanks to the publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads, the first real manifesto of the movement in England. His friend Coleridge contributed with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which opened the collection in the first edition (closed by Tintern Abbey). Although Wordsworth”s posthumous poem The Prelude is considered his masterpiece, it is actually the Lyrical Ballads that were a major influence on the nineteenth-century literary landscape.

The decidedly innovative character of his poetry, set in the evocative setting of the Lake District, in northern Cumberland, lies in the choice of the protagonists, characters of humble extraction drawn from everyday life, and of a simple and immediate language that closely follows their speech.

To be considered of equal (if not greater) importance for English Romantic literature is the Preface to the collection added to the 1802 edition, in fact a true critical essay in which the cardinal ideas of Romantic poetics are set forth.

Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, who were inspired by the same landscape setting of the Lakes, were called “Lake Poets”. Initiators of what has gone down in history as Ethical Romanticism (1798-1832), they constituted its first generation, while in the second can be counted George Gordon Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and John Keats (1795-1821). The later Romanticism (1832-1875), lost the revolutionary and innovative thrust of its predecessors, generally falls back on moralistic and didactic positions (to which the last Wordsworth may refer): for this reason it is considered part of the Victorian compromise.

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Revolutionary Wordsworth

The Parisian environment led him to espouse the anarchist and libertarian ideals of many rebellious thinkers and anti-monarchists of the time: just remember William Godwin, husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote the famous Vindication of the Rights of Women (Vindication of the Rights of Women). Driven by the same ideas, he repudiated not only the Christian faith but also the institution of family and marriage, intertwining relationships with several women, and in particular with Annette Vallon with whom he fell in love.

From her he had a daughter, Caroline, in 1792. In 1793 Wordsworth openly expressed his political convictions in A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff), in which he supported atheism and the revolutionary cause, praising the execution of Louis XVI of France. Involved in infighting in the ranks of the Girondins alongside Captain Beaupuy, he risked losing his life when Robespierre bloodily repressed their faction. The following year he published his first collections of poems: An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches.

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Return to England

Soon, however, the excesses of the Terror and then the Napoleonic imperialism that turned against England pushed him to return to his homeland, abandoning the woman he loved so much. But he recognized his daughter and never forgot them, visiting them in 1802 accompanied by his sister Dorothy. When, thanks to the success of the Lyrical Ballads and the settlement of a debt of 4500 pounds at the death of the Earl of Lonsdale (which he had avoided paying years before leaving the family in difficulty), he could finally enjoy a certain ease, he sent to Annette and her daughter all the money needed for their sustenance.

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Marriage with Mary and meeting with Coleridge

In the same year of the visit to Annette married Mary Hutchinson, a fact that marked his separation from France and Annette definitively. Testimony of this deep trauma is the drama The Borderers (1795). That year, however, marked a decisive stage for his future poetic production. It was then, in Bristol, that he met Coleridge, the cause of his approach to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German idealism.

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The Lyrical Ballads

The extraordinary sensitivity of his sister Dorothy, an essential element of mediation in his dialogue with nature, was equally important: the result of this synergy were the Lyrical Ballads (1798), a milestone in English Romantic poetry: key work of the collection is Tintern Abbey, in which the poet already sketches the story of his own sentimental development, while Coleridge collaborated on the volume with four poems, including the successful Ballad of the old sailor, which although they may seem different in reality are not very different either in subject or in the general style of the work. First manifesto of Romantic aesthetics is also to be considered the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, attached to the edition of 1800 and further enriched in 1802, in which Wordsworth exposes in detail his Romantic theory that revolutionized both the content and the English poetic language, and not only. Of this period are also the so-called Lucy poems, published separately between 1800 and 1807. Dedicated to a woman who died at a young age (in which some critics have seen the figure of Margaret Hutchinson, Mary”s younger sister), they synthetically render the cult of childhood, naivety and candor that allow the approach to the state of nature lost in the transition from childhood to adulthood and from the rural world to the city and industrial world and Wordsworth”s pantheistic vision of nature.

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Separation from Coleridge

The divergence of intentions and interests – Wordsworth stubbornly attached to the life of the humble, then inclined to more conservative positions both poetically and politically and socially, while Coleridge left poetry for philosophy (referring to German idealism) and symbolic research – and some personal misunderstandings led to a break around 1810, also due to Coleridge”s addiction to opium.

Romanticism marked the overcoming of the eighteenth-century rationalism of classical matrix – the Ballads show a nature vibrant with deep spirituality and sensuality far from the algid and detached goddess reason exalted by the Enlightenment – but Wordsworth did not lose the democratic sensitivity and spontaneous sympathy that, according to the French revolutionary spirit, were directed towards the poor and indigent classes.

Maturity: the reactionary Wordsworth

But Wordsworth”s political orientation was destined to change: the rise to power of Napoleon, crowned emperor in 1804 marked the beginning of a hard (and long) period of war with England, also squeezed by the pincers of the “continental bloc”. Wordsworth, who had seen in France the emblem of democracy and freedom, felt betrayed and began to gradually fall back on moderate and conservative positions (especially from 1808 onwards), until he re-embraced the Anglican religion and the monarchy with the Victorian compromise.

The tragic 1805 was marked among other things by the death of his brother John, a captain drowned at sea, and was destined to have a profound effect on his life as well as his future poetry: he completed the Poem to Coleridge (later published posthumously in 1850 by his wife under the title The Prelude, his most famous narrative poem), autobiographical part written by way of introduction for The Recluse, a project for a long philosophical poem of which The Excursion (The Excursion, 1814) was to be the second part (the third was never written).

Herbert Read read in the poet”s aversion to France and to the Revolution a real psychological removal with which Wordsworth would have repressed the pain of separation from Annette and from a country that, after all, he would not stop loving: if France, with the young Annette, was his lover, Read said, England with Mary became his wife. Faithful to his marriage as well as to the monarchy that protected him, he denied the liberating impulse of nature, seeing in it rather the order and authority of an austere patriarchal God: “and here is where Wordsworth ceases to be romantic, where his democratization of the heroic is no longer revolutionary: because in the creatures he points out as exemplary, it is no longer rebellion that he finds, but obedience to a law” (Praz).

In 1807 he published Poems in Two Volumes, containing among others the famous Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of early Childhood (“Ode: intuitions of immortality in the memories of childhood”) and I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud. Apart from a few trips to Germany (1798), Belgium (1828), the Netherlands (1823) and Italy (1820 and 1837), Wordsworth led a retired life marked by many domestic misfortunes: the death of his brother was added, a few years later, those of two of his five children, Thomas and Catherine (1812), and then the infirmity that made paralytic the beloved Dorothy in 1829. Paradoxically, it was then that he found himself at the height of celebrity and affluence, coming to be awarded the title of poet laureate in 1843 (succeeding Southey who had died that same year). He died at Rydal Mount, where he had lived since 1812, on April 23, 1850. His body was buried in St. Oswald”s Cemetery in Grasmere, among the lakes he had loved so deeply.

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Meaning of the Lyrical Ballads

The Romantic revolution arrived in England with the Lyrical Ballads. It is true that authors with overtly romantic tendencies (such as Blake) had preceded Wordsworth and Coleridge by a few decades, and that the romantic sensibility, a bit like all movements, is never entirely detached from the immediately preceding tradition: in fact, romanticism develops from that rediscovery of sensitivity that pervades eighteenth-century literature since the second half of that century to arrive at Rousseau and the French Revolution.

The great vogue for “folk” ballads, which Bishop Percy and McPherson present as rediscovered or drawn from folk tradition but actually written or extensively manipulated by the authors, already betrayed the public”s desire for poetry inspired by folk and Arcadian motifs. Works such as Edward Young”s Night Thoughts and Thomas Gray”s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard for the nameless dead because they belonged to the most humble strata of society were the foundations on which the Romantic poetry of the following century grew. It is no coincidence that Wordsworth brings together under the name of ballads the new collection, although the premises on which his speech is articulated are quite different.

In the 1802 preface he writes

Remarkable for that time is the abandonment, openly declared, of the eighteenth-century poetic diction inspired by the classicist model that Pope had defined nature to advantage dress”d, abandonment not motivated so much by aesthetic criteria, as ethical, now recognized as fundamental.

Wordsworth”s writing is in fact inspired by a desire for concreteness and spontaneity, as well as by that democratic sensibility mentioned above: the romantic poet is defined as

Wordsworth”s poetry, however, is only apparently artless, without art: the poet skillfully masters the blank verse already widely used by the English tradition (we find it already in the Elizabethan Theatre), which allows him to avoid rhyming and to use popular lemmas and expressions, with the effect of imitating the common speech. Unlike Pope and Dryden, the art here is cleverly concealed, not flaunted, reduced to the essential, because here the poetic message lies not so much in the form as in the content. Wordsworth”s audience is no longer the court, but includes all social classes, more sensitive to a poetry that has been modernized from archaic forms and is closer to people”s feelings.

In this linguistic choice he is the opposite of Coleridge who, on the contrary, reworks the popular ballad without renouncing archaisms, with a still eighteenth-century attention to the rhyme. On the other hand, Coleridge himself considered the everydayness and humility of the poetic subject incompatible with a poetry that turns its gaze to the supernatural or exotic: the beautiful and the sublime could not be identified with the common life, because in the present and in industrial England he saw a threat to the fundamental values of man. The two poets both considered themselves invested with a spiritual mission: for the Romantics, poetry is “more than the mere putting into verse of philosophical truths: the poet was also the prophet, and did not merely transcribe truths received from others but was himself the initiator of truth” (Anthony Burgess).

We find, again in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, also an important definition of what was, according to Wordsworth, Romantic poetry:

This means that the emotions and sensations felt at a particular moment will later be needed by the poet as the subject of his poetry, once he has returned to ordinary tranquility. Therefore, the message we get from this passage is twofold: first of all, we get a fundamental information on what is the fundamental subject of Wordsworth”s poetics, or more generally of Romantic poetry: feelings and emotions; moreover, we also get the definition of poetry as a necessary means to revive those emotions and feelings otherwise imprinted only in one”s memory.

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The value of memory: Tintern Abbey

But while, as we said, his friend sees poetry as an escape from reality, Wordsworth offers his readers a way to dialogue with the present and society: although his poetry is set in the wild and rocky setting of the English lakes, it is also a recollection in tranquillity, literally “recollection in stillness”, of personal experiences lived in nature that enrich those who live constrained by the reality of the industrial metropolis: The poet is not only the one who perceives the message of nature thanks to his particular sensitivity, but also the one who knows how to encode it in such a way as to evoke in the reader his own visual, auditory, and tactile experiences: in the most famous poem of the collection, Tintern Abbey, he says:

It is impossible to make this poem perfect in Italian, also because of the onomatopoeic value of certain words, in which the liquid and nasal consonants reproduce the flowing and falling of water (rolling – springs – murmur). The evocation of certain emotions is made possible above all by the “active” role of the recipient of the text, who becomes the interlocutor of the writer and gives him the opportunity for a detailed outburst: As Wordsworth states

The ethics of nature

In Wordsworth”s poetry, nature has ethical and moral value first and foremost. By evoking the Lake District in his poetry, Wordsworth not only introduced the world to this region blessed by nature, but also highlighted the ethical and not merely utilitarian value of environmental treasures. On the other hand, according to what he himself said, nature was what initiated him into life: the long walks on the steep mountains of the Cumberland would have brought him to his senses and forced him in some way out of the isolation in which he had fallen because of serious family problems.

Nature is therefore providential for Wordsworth, and God is creation, an immanent and visible God. This pantheistic and neo-Platonic vision of the universe pervades Wordsworth”s early poetry: an example is perhaps the most famous of the Lucy poems, A slumber Did My Spirit Seal (A sleep has numbed my spirit), where the poet mourns the death of his beloved woman:

Equally neo-platonic is Wordsworth”s belief that children in particular (as well as people untouched by civilization, and here there is a clear echo of Jean-Jacques Rousseau) are closer to God because in them remains the memory of the celestial world in which we were all before we were born. Among the most famous characters of the Lyrical Ballads are in fact children, vagrants, disabled people, madmen: “unseemly” subjects who caused a scandal in the first years following the publication of the work (so much so that they provided the right to many parodies), but who in time opened the way to greater social solidarity, pushing many Victorians both in letters and in politics to fight for the great social reforms of that century.

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The Nineteenth Century

It is difficult to imagine how English Romanticism would have evolved without the Lyrical Ballads, and thus the entire post-Romantic tradition up to the present day. Precisely because of the copyright restrictions in force at the time, which allowed partial publication of a collection by other publishers without paying royalties, his ballads ended up being published in thousands of copies in newspapers, giving him far greater fame than he would have had from the publication of his book. While the first edition sold five hundred copies, a good circulation for a book at the time, newspapers such as The Critical Review and the Lady Magazine reached figures between four thousand and ten thousand copies, though public acclaim did not yet touch Coleridge (The Ballad of the Old Mariner relegated to the last places after the first edition). Wordsworth”s success rebounded in the United States, where great magazines such as Literary Magazine of Philadelphia made him the literary phenomenon of the century. During the Victorian era it was Matthew Arnold who defended Wordsworth”s poetic revolution against detractors who wanted to hand him down to posterity in his oleographic guise of the poet laureate and braghettone who appeared in his later years.

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The Twentieth Century

The early twentieth century marked a rediscovery of the Lyrical Ballads by critics, with numerous studies, such as the aforementioned Wordsworth by Herbert Read (1930). Also of those years is the work of Basil Willey, later published in Italian, on the English culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which highlights the relationship of the poet with sensitivism and the French Revolution.

The Mirror and the Lamp by M.H. Abrams, translated into Italian in 1976 with the title Lo specchio e la lampada (The Mirror and the Lamp), is still considered a masterly study for the student of Anglistics. An authoritative dissenting voice, but one destined to cause much discussion, was that of Robert Mayo (1954), who wanted to see in many of Wordsworth”s characters a lack of originality and an excessive indebtedness to the old eighteenth-century ballads. Very interesting are also the more recent studies of P.D. Sheats (1973) and two contributions of John J. Jordan (1970 and 1976). Today the Lake District is a national monument and an area protected by English law.

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Italian translations

Sources