William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
Born April 7, 1770(1770-04-07)
Cockermouth, England, UK
Died April 23, 1850 (aged 80)
Ambleside, England, UK
Occupation Poet
Literary movement Romanticism
William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850) was a major
English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the
Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical
Ballads.
Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude,
an autobiographical poem of his early years which the poet revised and expanded
a number of times. The work was posthumously titled and published, prior to
which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth
was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
Early life and education
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson,
William Wordsworth was born April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth in Cumberland—part of
the scenic region in north-west England called the Lake District. His sister,
the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was
born the following year. After the death of their mother in 1778, their father
sent William to Hawkshead Grammar School and sent Dorothy to live with
relatives in Yorkshire. She and William did not meet again for another nine
years. His father died when he was 13.[1]
Wordsworth began attending St John's College, Cambridge in 1787,
maintained by his maternal grandparents. He returned to Hawkshead for his first
two summer holidays, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting
places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790, he took a nearly 3000
mile walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and
also visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy. It is also said
that he visited China to learn the language of the Samurai, but sources are
inconclusive. The following year, he graduated from Cambridge without
distinction. His youngest brother, Christopher, rose to be Master of Trinity
College.[2]
Relationship with
Annette Vallon
In November 1791, Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France and became
enthralled with the Republican movement. He fell in love with a French woman,
Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave birth to their child, Caroline. Because of lack
of money and Britain's tensions with France, he returned alone to England the
next year.[3] The circumstances of his return and his subsequent behaviour
raise doubts as to his declared wish to marry Annette but he supported her and
his daughter as best he could in later life. During this period, he wrote his
acclaimed "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," recalling his
seaside walk with his daughter, whom he had not seen for ten years. At the
conception of this poem, he had never seen his daughter before. The occurring
lines reveal his deep love for both child and mother. The Reign of Terror
estranged him from the Republican movement, and war between France and Britain
prevented him from seeing Annette and Caroline again for several years. There are
also strong suggestions that Wordsworth may have been depressed and emotionally
unsettled in the mid 1790s.
With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802
Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy visited Annette and Caroline in France and
arrived at a mutually agreeable settlement regarding Wordsworth's
obligations.[3]
First
publication and Lyrical Ballads
In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" which is called the
'manifest' of English Romantic criticism, Wordsworth calls his poems '
Experimental'. 1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the
collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He received a legacy of
£900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing poetry.
That year, he also met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets
quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister,
Dorothy, moved to Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's
home in Nether Stowey. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from
Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English
Romantic movement. The volume had neither the name of Wordsworth nor Coleridge
as the author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern
Abbey", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's "The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only
Wordsworth listed as the author, and included a preface to the poems, which was
significantly augmented in the 1802 edition. This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is
considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth
discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on
the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of
much eighteenth-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth also gives his famous
definition of poetry askeets "the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility." A fourth and final edition
of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805.
Germany and
move to the Lake District
Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge then travelled to Germany in the
autumn of 1798. While Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the trip, its
main effect on Wordsworth was to produce homesickness.[3] During the harsh
winter of 1798–1799, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in Goslar, and despite
extreme stress and loneliness, he began work on an autobiographical piece later
titled The Prelude. He also wrote a number of famous poems, including "the
Lucy poems". He and his sister moved back to England, now to Dove Cottage
in Grasmere in the Lake District, and this time with fellow poet Robert Southey
nearby. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey came to be known as the "Lake
Poets". Through this period, many of his poems revolve around themes of
death, endurance, separation, and grief.
John Wordsworth - June 18th 1803 - 1875. Married four times: 1)
Isabella Curwen (d. 1848)had six children: Jane, Henry, William, John, Charles
and Edward. 2) Helen Ross (d. 1854) no issue. 3) Mary Ann Dolan (d. after 1856)
had 1 daughter Dora (b.1858). 4) Mary Gamble. no issue
Dora Wordsworth - August 16th 1804 - July 9th 1847. She married
Edward Quillinan
Thomas Wordsworth - June 15th 1806 - December 1st 1812
Catherine Wordsworth - September 6th 1808 - June 4th 1812
William "Willy" Wordsworth - May 12th 1810 - 1883. He
married Fanny Graham and had four children: Mary Louisa, William, Reginald and
Gordon.
Autobiographical
work and Poems in Two Volumes
Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long
philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call The Recluse. He
had in 1798–99 started an autobiographical poem, which he never named but
called the "poem to Coleridge", which would serve as an appendix to
The Recluse. In 1804 he began expanding this autobiographical work, having
decided to make it a prologue rather than an appendix to the larger work he
planned. By 1805, he had completed it, but refused to publish such a personal
work until he had completed the whole of The Recluse. The death of his brother,
John, in 1805 affected him strongly.
The source of Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances as articulated
in The Prelude and in such shorter works as "Lines composed a few miles
above Tintern Abbey" has been the source of much critical debate. While it
had long been supposed that Wordsworth relied chiefly on Coleridge for
philosophical guidance, more recent scholarship has suggested that Wordsworth's
ideas may have been formed years before he and Coleridge became friends in the
mid 1790s. While in Revolutionary Paris in 1792, the twenty-two year old
Wordsworth made the acquaintance of the mysterious traveller John
"Walking" Stewart (1747-1822),[4] who was nearing the end of a
thirty-years' peregrination from Madras, India, through Persia and Arabia,
across Africa and all of Europe, and up through the fledgling United States. By
the time of their association, Stewart had published an ambitious work of
original materialist philosophy entitled The Apocalypse of Nature (London,
1791), to which many of Wordsworth's philosophical sentiments are likely
indebted.
In 1807, his Poems in Two Volumes were published, including
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood". Up to this point Wordsworth was known publicly only for
Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this collection would cement his reputation. Its
reception was lukewarm, however. For a time (starting in 1810), Wordsworth and
Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction.[3] Two of his
children, Thomas and Catherine, died in 1812. The following year, he received
an appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, and the £400 per
year income from the post made him financially secure. His family, including
Dorothy, moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside (between Grasmere and Rydal Water) in
1813, where he spent the rest of his life.[3]
The
Prospectus
In 1814 he published The Excursion as the second part of the
three-part The Recluse. He had not completed the first and third parts, and
never would complete them. However, he did write a poetic Prospectus to
"The Recluse" in which he lays out the structure and intent of the
poem. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most famous lines on the
relation between the human mind and nature:
My voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,
Theme this but little heard of among Men,
The external World is fitted to the Mind . . .
Some modern critics recognise a decline in his works beginning
around the mid-1810s. But this decline was perhaps more a change in his
lifestyle and beliefs, since most of the issues that characterise his early
poetry (loss, death, endurance, separation, abandonment) were resolved in his
writings. But, by 1820 he enjoyed the success accompanying a reversal in the
contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works. By 1828, Wordsworth had
become fully reconciled to Coleridge, and the two toured the Rhineland together
that year.[3] Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 that rendered her
an invalid for the remainder of her life. In 1835, Wordsworth gave Annette and
Caroline the money they needed for support.
The Poet Laureate and other honours
Death
William Wordsworth died of pneumonia on the 23rd April 1850 and was
buried at St. Oswald's church in Grasmere. His widow Mary published his lengthy
autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months
after his death. Though this failed to arouse great interest in 1850, it has
since come to be recognised as his masterpiece.
Список литературы
Для
подготовки данной работы были использованы материалы с сайта http://en.wikipedia.org