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Who Was William Wordswo rth?

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Who Was

WilliamWordsw

orth?

Who Was

WilliamWordsw

orth?

A British Poet who was born April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District.

He was orphaned at an early stage.

He made his debut as a writer in 1787, when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine.

He refused to follow set poetic conventions and forged his own way in the realm of poetry.

• He was a Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.

• He was Britain’s Poet Laureate, a poet officially appointed by a government to compose poems for state occasions, for seven years.

• He died on April 23, 1850.

Romanticism• An artistic and intellectual movement originating in

Europe in the late 1700s which was characterised by a heightened interest in nature.

• Romanticism stressed emotion over reason and the primacy of the individual will over social norms of behavior.

• First-person lyric poems became the major romantic literary form, with “I” often referring directly to the poet.

• The development of the ‘self’ was a major topic of romantic poetry.

Wordsworth’s Philosophy of Nature

• He believed that God was revealed to man through nature because nature was a manifestation of God's creation in its purest, most uncorrupted form.

• His best poetry is the lofty and sublime expression of the divine solace and comfort which he found in nature.

• He believed that the soul, instructed by the senses and by nature, transcends both and becomes assimilated with a divine totality.

Lyrical Ballads • The publication in 1798 of this book marked the

“official” opening of the English Romantic period. • The book opened with Coleridge's famous “The

Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and closed with Wordsworth's now recognised masterpiece “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.

• The poems were negatively received by critics because of ‘uninteresting subjects’ but later were praised for same reason.

Lyrical Ballads• In 1800 Wordsworth prepared a second edition, to

which he added a second volume of his poems. • He added a Preface that was a “defense of the theory

upon which the poems were written.” In this Preface Wordsworth make the following points :

– Good poetry must speak language “really spoken by men” and write about the life of common people in an imaginative way.

– Good poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings arising from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

– The objects which excited these emotions could be simple, ordinary things: a tree, a mountain, a rainbow and so on.

The Rainbow

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!

The Child is father of the Man; I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

William Wordsworth

Final Thoughts• Wordsworth was the poet of nature, the purity of childhood

and memory.

• His new style of writing changed the course of English poetry, replacing the elaborate classical forms with a new Romantic sensibility.

• It was Wordsworth's emotional power, rather than his range of intellect, that made him famous and influential. To him, poetry was an overflowing of emotion onto paper backed up by the refusal to conform to the “rules” of society.

• He heavily influenced later writers such as John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Emerson and Thoreau.