William Wordsworth

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William Wordsworth (1780 – 1850), an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to introduce the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798). The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his youth that he revised and expanded a number of times, is generally considered Wordsworth's magnum opus.

It was posthumously named and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge."

Wordsworth was Britain's poet laureate from 1843 to his death from pleurisy on April 23, 1850.

Early life

William Wordsworth, the second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, (now Cumbria), part of the Lake District, northwestern England's scenic area. William's sister, poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptized together. They had three others siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer, and John, who died on the south coast of England after Dorothy, the earliest one, was lost; and Christopher, the youngest, who was to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Cambridge.

The father of Wordsworth was a legal representative of James Lowther, the 1st Earl of Lonsdale, and he lived in a large mansion in the tiny town. Since he was often away from home on business, the young William and his siblings had no contact with him and remained distant from him until his death in 1783. However, he did encourage William to read more, and in particular, he compelled him to commit large portions of verse to memory, including works by Milton, Shakespeare, and Spenser. William was also allowed to use his father's library. William spent time at his mother's house in Penrith, Cumberland, where he was introduced to the moors but did not get along with his grandparents or uncle, who also lived there. His enraged interactions with them stung him to the point of contemplating suicide.

Wordsworth was taught by his mother and attended a small school of poor quality in Cockermouth first, then a Penrith school for the children of upper-class families, where Ann Birkett continued to instilling in her students' traditions that included both scholarly and local activities, especially the ones on Easter, May Day and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and Spectator, but not much else. He encountered the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who later became his wife, at Penrith's academy.

Following Wordsworth's mother's death in 1778, his father took him to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire (now Cumbria) and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She and William didn't meet again for nine years.

When Wordsworth first published a sonnet in The European Journal in 1787, he made his debut as a writer. He began attending St John's College, Cambridge, in the same year. He earned his BA degree in 1791. He returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his Cambridge stay, and he spent much of his remaining holidays on walking tours, discovering sights noted for the beauty of their countryside. He went on a walking tour of Europe in 1790, during which he toured the Alps extensively and visited nearby towns of France, Switzerland, and Italy.

Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France in November 1791 and became enchanted with the Republican movement. He fell in love with Annette Vallon, a French woman who gave birth to their daughter Caroline in 1792. Due to financial difficulties and Britain's tense relations with France, he was compelled to return to England alone the next year. The circumstances surrounding his return and his subsequent conduct raised doubts about his ostensible desire to marry Annette. However, he still helped her and his daughter as best he could in later life. The Reign of Terrorist ended in Wordsworth's dissatisfaction with the French Revolution and the outbreak of armed conflict between Britain and France, which prevented him from seeing Annette and his daughter for many years.

In 1802 Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy visited Annette and Caroline in Calais as part of the Peace of Amiens. The intention of the visit was to prepare Annette for the possibility of his upcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson. "It's a beauteous evening, calm and free," he wrote after returning from a seaside walk with the 9-year-old Caroline, whom he had never seen before. Mary was afraid that Wordsworth would do more for Caroline. Wordsworth settled £30 a year on Caroline (equivalent to £2,313 in 2021), payments that continued until 1835, when they were replaced by a capital settlement.

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Early career

In the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, Wordsworth's first collection of poems appeared in 1793. In 1795, he received a £900 from Raisley Calvert and went on to pursue a career as a writer.

She wrote,

The pair migrated to Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's house in Nether Stowey, who lived in 1797. Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic period, was produced by Wordsworth and Coleridge (with Dorothy's insight). In the volume, neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge's name appeared as author. "Tintern Abbey," one of Wordsworth's most popular poems, was included in this collection, as well as Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Only Wordsworth was listed as the author in the second edition, which also included a preface to the poems. The new edition, which was published in 1802, was notably expanded. Wordsworth addresses what he sees as the key elements of a new type of verse, one that is based on the common language "really used by men," while avoiding much of 18th-century verse's poetic diction. In addition, Wordsworth describes poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of strong emotions: it comes from emotion recalled in calm" and "experimental" in his book. In 1805, Lyrical Ballads' fourth and final edition was published.

Wordsworth wrote his only play, The Borderers, during King Henry III of England's reign, when Englishmen in the North Country came into conflict with Scottish border reivers. In November 1797, he attempted to get the play staged, but Thomas Harris, the company's director, said it was "impossible" that the play should succeed in the representation. The rebuff was not received lightly by Wordsworth, and the play was not released until 1842, after substantial revision.

Later career

Wordsworth had been planning to write a long philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call The Recluse. He began an autobiographical poem in 1798-99, which he referred to as the "poem to Coleridge" and that he intended to include in an appendix to a larger work titled The Recluse. He began expanding this autobiographical work in 1804, rather than an appendix. He completed this project, which is now commonly known as the first version of The Prelude, in 1805, but he refused to release such a personal work until he had completed the whole of The Recluse. John's brother John's death, which occurred in 1805, affected him greatly and may have influenced his decisions on these works.

Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances, as well as in "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey," have a point of contention. Wordsworth was long believed that they depended on Coleridge for philosophical support, but more recently scholars have suggested that Wordsworth's theories had existed years before he and Coleridge became close friends in the mid-1990s. The 22-year-old Wordsworth, a pioneer of modern Paris in 1792, met John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822), who was wandering on foot from Madras, India, through Persia and Arabia, through Africa and Europe, and finally to the fledgling United States in 1792. Stewart had published The Apocalypse of Nature, a groundbreaking work of original materialist philosophy (London, 1791), to which many of Wordsworth's philosophical convictions may well be indebted.

"Ode: In 1807 Wordsworth published Poems, as well as "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," the author wrote "Death of Reminding of Early Childhood." Up to this point, Wordsworth was only known for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped that this new collection would help cement his name. However, the reception was lukewarm.

Wordsworth and Coleridge were feared because of the latter's opium use in 1810, and Thomas, his son Thomas died at the age of 6, six months after the death of 3-year-old Catherine in 1810. He was given a Westmorland Stamp Distributor of Stamps and, as a result of his stipend, but not without the cost of political independence. He and his family, including Dorothy, moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside, 1813, where he lived the remainder of his life.

Even though he never finished the first or the third part of The Excursion in 1814 Wordsworth's The Excursion became the second part of the three-part story The Recluse. He did, however, write a poetic Prospectus to The Recluse in which he laid out the entire work's plans and intention. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most popular lines on the relationship between the human mind and nature: the human mind and nature are among Wordsworth's most popular lines on the subject.

According to some modern scholars, a decline in his writings and life began around the mid-1890s, perhaps because the bulk of his early poems (loss, passion, separation, and abandonment) had been addressed in his writings and life. He was having a lot of success as a result of a revival in the modern critical view of his earlier works by 1820.

Wordsworth's boldness in situating his poetry on the human mind stunned poet William Blake, who had no knowledge of Wordsworth's writing. William Blake wrote to his friend Henry Crabb Robinson that the passage "caused him a bowel complaint that nearly killed him" in reaction to Wordsworth's poetic program that "when we look / into our thoughts," into the Mind of Man-/My haunt, and the main area of my song" (The Excursion).

Wordsworth mended his friendship with Coleridge after his friend, painter William Green, died in 1823. By 1828, the two were fully reconciled, as they toured Rhineland together. Dorothy was crippled by a severe illness in 1829 that made her inactive for the remainder of her life. Coleridge and Charles Lamb died in 1834, their death being a blow to Wordsworth. James Hogg passed away in the following year. Despite the death of several contemporaries, the success of his poetry had prompted a steady stream of young friends and admirers to replace those he had lost.

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