Biography of WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
William Wordsworth date of birth
William Wordsworth was born in 1770 at
Cockermouth, in the north of the lake country.
William Wordsworth early life
He was the second child of a
fairly prosperous attorney-at-law. William lost his mother at the age of eight
and his father at the age of thirteen. His only companion was his sister,
Dorothy Wordsworth. He spent his early childhood in Lake Districts, the natural
scenes of which influenced him to a great extent. He had his education at St.
John's School, Cambridge, and remained there till 1791.
Life and Works of William Wordsworth
He his poetic career
quite early in his life. In 1813 he was appointed as a stamp- distributor. Gradually
his reputation as a poet increased. He was honoured with a state pension in
1842 and the laureateship in 1843. He died in 1850.
Wordsworth chief works are Descriptive Sketches
(1793), Lyrical Ballads (1798), Michael (1800), (1799-1805), The Excursion
(1814), etc.
He, too was a literary critic of eminence,
and his Preface and Appendix to Lyrical Ballads (1798) are noted contributions
to English literary criticism.
Wordsworth as a Poet
His Creative Wonders
Wordsworth remains a standing example of the
miracle of poetry—the miracle that invests the world with the light that was
never before. His is the figure of a powerful and original pet in whose lines
poetry and philosophy, nature and man, are found fused and blent, and have
almost a cosmic harmony.
Wordsworth is basically a poet of Nature. But
it is not the love of natural scene, however enthralling these may be, that is
seen in his poetry. He is a devotee of Nature—one who finds in her hills and
dales, springs and rivers, birds and flowers, joy infinite and quietude
immense.
A study of such poems as “The Prelude” and “Tintern
Abbey” clearly reveals that there were three distinct stages of Wordsworth's
education by Nature and an equal number of phases of his love for her. During
the first of these stages, he says, Nature was a matter of physical pleasures
or animal activities to him—
"But secondary to my
own pursuits
And animal activities,
and all
Their trivial
pleasures."
These activities and pleasures gradually lost
their charm and yet his love of Nature, for her own sake, grew deep and
intense. Wordsworth found it difficult to describe this second phase of his
love for Nature:
“I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding
cataract
Haunted me like a passion.”
The tall rocks and mountains were to him then
"an appetite". The Second phase lasted, by his own account, until he
was more than twenty-two.
Then occurred the crisis of his political
thought which shook his faith in man and life to its foundations. For a time he
immersed himself in Godwin's Political Justice in which the gymnast Reason
is-made the governor of all human acting, But that was all in vain, and very
soon, though gradually, the love of Nature returned to him under the influence
and loving care of Dorothy and Coleridge. In this third phase, Nature had lost
its old despotism, and was subdued to a dominant scheme of deep thought and
divine contemplation. Wordsworth's love for her became spiritualized and
co-existent in his mind with his love of man. He found in Nature a deep mystic significance,
but Man, as a whole, at the same time, found in Wordsworth's mind, his due
place in the scheme of creation. From now on he became as much the poet of Man
as of Nature. Nature now became a religion with him and he realized that "there
is a spirit in the woods." He was now, what he had called himself, "a
worshipper of Nature." Books appeared to him a dull and endless strife" and a very poor teacher,
when weighed in the same balance with Nature. "One impulse from a vernal
wood," he boldly asserted, might teach "more of moral good and
evil" "than all the sages can." Every natural object appeared to
him to have a moral life of its own.
His deep conviction now was that "every
flower enjoys the air it breathes," and "the meanest flower"
moved him to the emotion that lay "too deep for tears." In the
sonnet, beginning with “The World is too much with us," he gave vent to
his indignation against the Englishmen who, on account of their materialistic
shallowness, found nothing in Nature to appreciate. That was why he was deeply
definite of the lasting effect of a lovely spot of Nature on him just at
present and the future to come.
To Wordsworth the education of Nature meant
something very real and not a mere fancy. In Ruth, he spoke of the influence of
natural surroundings on one's temper and character. The poem shows "how
winds, tempests, the splendours and languors of the tropics, nourished wild
impulses and voluptuous tendencies in the heart of the young soldier." In
one fine Lucy lyric, he eulogized the education of the girl who had grown three
years "in sun and shower."
The renewed love of Nature brought Wordsworth
also to a love of Man, and he evolved a sort of pantheism in which both Man and
Nature became co-equals and co-existent in the scheme of creation. He reduced
Man to his lowest terms and, in his poetry, dealt with the unsophisticated man,
unspoilt by social conventions, or with the simple child who was to Wordsworth
a "mighty prophet" and "seer blest". The decrepit old
leech-gatherer taught Wordsworth the lessons of Revolution and Independence,
the old Cumberland Beggar taught him that 'the meanest of Nature's creation is
rot useless'. Wordsworth thus became a poet of Man and Nature, Man to the level
of Nature and raising Nature to the level of Man.
Wordsworth is a poet of contemplation. It is
with the help of his contemplation— impassioned contemplation—that he seems to
commune both with Nature and with Man.
Wordsworth's view is that poetry should be
'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings', taking 'its origin from
emotion recollected in tranquility', and not the mere satisfaction of a taste
for imagery and ornament. His aim, as revealed in his poetry and criticism,
"is to show the poet as a man appealing to the normal interests of mankind',
bringing poetry closer to man and living in Nature in whose bosom he has an
ideal setting. As such, the language of poetry, in his view, is the language of
common life—
“…..I
have chosen subject from common life, and endeavoured to bring my language near
to the real language of men”.
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