William Wordsworth biography

Dromo's Den

William Wordsworth Biography

WORDSWORTH, William (1770–1850). An English poet, born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, April 7, 1770. He came from a family that had long been settled in the north country. William was the second son. His sister Dorothy (1771–1855), a remarkable woman, was the poet's companion through mature life. William was sent to the schools at Cockermouth and Penrith, and, after the death of his mother (1778), he was transferred to the grammar school at Hawkshead, a picturesque village by Esthwaite Water, where he remained till 1787. His father had died in 1783. The years passed at Hawkshead were the seedtime of his soul. He read widely, joined in the society of the country folk, took long solitary strolls, and had mystic visions in which nature seemed to palpitate with life. Wordsworth studied at St. John's College, Cambridge, graduating in 1791. In 1790 he interrupted his studies to take a tour through France and Switzerland with Robert Jones, a college friend, afterward fellow of St. John's. Unsettled in his plans, after a three-months' stay in London, he again went to France, staying a full year (November, 1791, to December, 1792). He embraced the principles of the Revolution, and in spite of its excesses, his republicanism was not wholly dissipated till the French invasion of Switzerland (1798). Later he became a stanch Conservative, if not a Tory. For this change, sincere and natural, he was severely criticized by many of his republican contemporaries, e.g., by Byron; and in The Lost Leader, Browning, while not intending it directly for Wordsworth, yet used him as a subject in describing the effect upon ardent young Liberals of the defection of an admired leader. Returning to England, Wordsworth made his first appearance as poet in An Evening Walk (1793), and Descriptive Sketches taken during a Pedestrian Tour among the Alps (1793). The poet's masters were then Pope, Goldsmith, and Cowper. These two poems, composed in the heroic couplet, contain many refined and delightful sketches taken from nature at first hand. Coleridge saw in the second volume "the emergence of an original poetical genius." In 1795 Wordsworth settled with his sister at Racedown, near Crewkerne, moving (1797) to Alfoxden, 3 miles from Nether Stowey, where Coleridge was then living. At Racedown Wordsworth wrote several poems, in which the heroic couplet was abandoned. Among them were Guilt and Sorrow in the Spenserian stanza, and a tragedy in blank verse, devoid of dramatic power, called The Borderers. But the main outcome of the period was a joint publication of the two poets entitled Lyrical Ballads (1798), a memorable volume, which, though severely criticized by reviewers and neglected by the public, marks an epoch in the history of English poetry. Coleridge contributed The Ancient Mariner and three other poems. Wordsworth's poems, Simon Lee, We Are Seven, Expostulation and Reply, "were written" (so runs the advertisement) "with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." The volume closed with the beautiful Lines on Tintern Abbey, commemorating a tour with Dorothy up the Wye valley. The volume Lyrical Ballads was republished in 1800, with the addition of the famous and epoch-making preface. In this Preface Wordsworth elaborated the thesis that there is no "essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition." The thesis was ably criticized by Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (1817), and is now generally regarded as an extreme position. To it Wordsworth always held in theory, but, to his good fortune, he often forgot it in practice. The Preface, though needing qualification, was most salutary. It put an end to the conventional poetic diction of the eighteenth century; the publication of the little book is generally taken to mark the definite beginning of the Romantic movement in England, and of the glories of nineteenth-century English poetry.

Meanwhile Wordsworth and his sister, having been supplied with funds by the Wedgwoods, had accompanied Coleridge to Germany (1798–99). Coleridge went to Göttingen to study philosophy; the Wordsworths settled down in Goslar for the winter. The poet hardly knew a word of German, but his genius throve at Goslar. There he began his Prelude and his first song of "Lucy." Returning to England, William and his sister settled in Dove Cottage at Grasmere, the loveliest spot among the English Lakes (1799), and they finally made their home at Rydal Mount (1813). In 1802 the Earl of Lonsdale died, and his successor paid over to the Wordsworths a debt of £8500 and afterward further helped them. Having thus a competency, Wordsworth married (Oct. 4, 1802) Miss Mary Hutchinson (born Aug. 16, 1770), a friend from youth, portrayed in "She was a phantom of delight." For nearly 50 years Wordsworth's life flowed on tranquilly, a noble illustration of "plain living and high thinking." Coleridge for a time lived near him and with him, but the poets became estranged, never to be wholly reconciled. Friends and admirers gathered around Wordsworth—John Wilson, De Quincey, Henry Crabb Robinson, and Sir George Beaumont, the landscape painter. Southey, too, lived near at Keswick. In London Wordsworth associated with Rogers, Haydon, Hunt, Keats, and others. He made many tours, of which those into Scotland, to the Highlands, furnished him with exquisite poetic material. In 1813 Wordsworth was appointed distributor of stamps for Westmoreland, a post that brought him £400 a year. In 1820 he spent four months in Switzerland and in Italy, visited Belgium in 1823 and 1828, and made his last Continental tour in 1837. In 1842 he received a government pension of £300 a year; and in 1843 he succeeded Southey in the laureateship. He died at Rydal Mount, April 23, 1850, and was buried in the Grasmere churchyard. Dorothy survived her brother till Jan. 25, 1855. Mrs. Wordsworth died Jan. 17, 1859. A favorite child, Dorothy, who had married Edward Quillinan (q.v.), died in 1847. Two sons survived.

Wordsworth consecrated his life to poetry, issuing volume after volume, and for a long time meeting with little favor. The attitude of the orthodox critics was summed up in Jeffrey's "This will never do!" (Edinburgh Review, November, 1814). Wordsworth nevertheless had defenders in Wilson, De Quincey, Lamb, Coleridge, and the younger generation; and his serene belief in himself was justified by full recognition. Poems (2 vols., 1807) contained much of his finest verse, as "To a Highland Girl," "The Solitary Reaper," "I wandered lonely as a cloud," and the odes to duty and on immortality. In 1814 appeared The Excursion, a didactic epic in blank verse, ridiculed by Byron, but now regarded as the best of Wordsworth's longer poems. In 1815 Wordsworth republished his poems in two volumes, arranging them on philosophical principles. Later he published The White Doe of Rylstone (1815); Thanksgiving Ode (1816); Peter Bell (1819); The Waggoner, with Sonnets (1819); The River Duddon (1820), a series of noble sonnets, the best since Milton; Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822), an unfortunate attempt to shape the history of the Church in Britain to a sonnet sequence; Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (1835); Poems, chiefly of early and late years (1842); The Prelude, a highly interesting autobiographical poem (posthumous, 1850); and The Recluse, a fragment (1888). Wordsworth also issued collected editions of his work, containing revisions and additions, in 1820, 1827, 1832, 1836–37, 1843, 1846, and 1849–50. It was Wordsworth's aim to depict the elemental passions in unaffected language, and in his best work he succeeded—though his simplicity sometimes became tedious. In his inspired moments, "Nature herself," said Matthew Arnold, "seemed to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power." Wordsworth's passion for nature and his insistence on the brotherhood of man passed into the thought of the nineteenth century. Though Burns and Cowper and Crabbe had described nature before him, it was his to take up what Arnold has called the office of modern poetry, the moral interpretation of nature. He held a sort of NeoPlatonic, almost pantheistic, view of the existence of a soul, something conscious and all but divine, in nature. He also vindicated the possibility of treating the lives and emotions of the humblest classes in a strain of deep poetry.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XXIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 730-731.