Read complete books and articles on: William Wordsworth

Wordsworth, William - 1770–1850, English poet, b. Cockermouth, Cumberland. One of the great English poets, he was a leader of the romantic movement in England.

Life and Works

Wordsworth, William - 1770–1850, English poet, b. Cockermouth, Cumberland. One of the great English poets, he was a leader of the romantic movement in England.

Life and Works

In 1791 he graduated from Cambridge and traveled abroad. While in France he fell in love with Annette Vallon, who bore him a daughter, Caroline, in 1792. Although he did not marry her, it seems to have been circumstance rather than lack of affection that separated them. Throughout his life he supported Annette and Caroline as best he could, finally settling a sum of money on them in 1835.

The spirit of the French Revolution had strongly influenced Wordsworth, and he returned (1792) to England imbued with the principles of Rousseau and republicanism. In 1793 were published An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, written in the stylized idiom and vocabulary of the 18th cent. The outbreak of the Reign of Terror prevented Wordsworth's return to France, and after receiving several small legacies, he settled with his sister Dorothy in Dorsetshire. Wordsworth was extraordinarily close to his sister. Throughout his life she was his constant and devoted companion, sharing his poetic vision and helping him with his work.

In Dorsetshire Wordsworth became the intimate friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and, probably under his influence, a student of David Hartley's empiricist philosophy. Together the two poets wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798), in which they sought to use the language of ordinary people in poetry; it included Wordsworth's poem "Tintern Abbey." The work introduced romanticism into England and became a manifesto for romantic poets. In 1799 he and his sister moved to the Lake District of England, where they lived the remainder of their lives. A second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800), which included a critical essay outlining Wordsworth's poetic principles, in particular his ideas about poetic diction and meter, was unmercifully attacked by critics.

In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, an old school friend; the union was evidently a happy one, and the couple had four children. The Prelude, his long autobiographical poem, was completed in 1805, though it was not published until after his death. His next collection, Poems in Two Volumes (1807), included the well-known "Ode to Duty," the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," and a number of famous sonnets.

Thereafter, Wordsworth's creative powers diminished. Nonetheless, some notable poems were produced after this date, including The Excursion (1814), "Laodamia" (1815), "White Doe of Rylstone" (1815), Memorials of a Tour of the Continent, 1820 (1822), and "Yarrow Revisited" (1835). In 1842 Wordsworth was given a civil list pension, and the following year, having long since put aside radical sympathies, he was named poet laureate.

Assessment

Wordsworth's personality and poetry were deeply influenced by his love of nature, especially by the sights and scenes of the Lake Country, in which he spent most of his mature life. A profoundly earnest and sincere thinker, he displayed a high seriousness comparable, at times, to Milton's but tempered with tenderness and a love of simplicity.

Wordsworth's earlier work shows the poetic beauty of commonplace things and people as in "Margaret," "Peter Bell," "Michael," and "The Idiot Boy." His use of the language of ordinary speech was heavily criticized, but it helped to rid English poetry of the more artificial conventions of 18th-century diction. Among his other well-known poems are "Lucy" ("She dwelt among the untrodden ways"), "The Solitary Reaper," "Resolution and Independence," "Daffodils," "The Rainbow," and the sonnet "The World Is Too Much with Us."

Although Wordsworth was venerated in the 19th cent., by the early 20th cent. his reputation had declined. He was criticized for the unevenness of his poetry, for his rather marked capacity for bathos, and for his transformation from an open-minded liberal to a cramped conservative. In recent years, however, Wordsworth has again been recognized as a great English poet—a profound, original thinker who created a new poetic tradition.

Bibliography

See his poetical works, ed. by E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire (5 vol., 1940–49); his prose works, ed. by W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser (3 vol., 1974); correspondence with his sister, ed. by E. de Selincourt (6 vol., 1967–82); biographies by M. Moorman (2 vol., 1965), S. Gill (1984), and K. R. Johnston (1999); studies by M. Reed (1967), F. E. Halliday (1970), R. Rehder (1981), J. K. Changler (1984), P. Hamilton (1986), A. J. Bewell (1989), and D. Bromwich (1999); G. McMaster, William Wordsworth: A Critical Anthology (1973).

Dorothy Wordsworth

Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, 1771–1855, is known principally for her poems and for her journals, which have proved invaluable for later biographies and studies of the poet. These journals, the first of which was started in 1798, are written in delicate, exquisite diction, describing the Wordsworth household, friends, and travels. For the last 20 years of her life Dorothy Wordsworth was an invalid, suffering from an obscure illness that made her prematurely senile.

Bibliography

See her journals, ed. by H. Darbishire (2 vol., 1958); biography by E. de Selincourt (1933); A. M. Ellis, Rebels and Conservatives: Dorothy and William Wordsworth and Their Circle (1967); E. Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal (1974).

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16 of the Best Books and Articles on: William Wordsworth

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

William Wordsworth: A Biography » Read Now
by Mary Moorman. 634 pgs.

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...WILLIAM WORDSWORTH THE EARLY YEARS 1770-1803 Oxford...FROM A DRAWING BY HENRY EDRIDGE WILLIAM WORDSWORTH A BIOGRAPHY THE EARLY YEARS...Wordsworth, who compiled Memoirs of...
2.

Select Poems of William Wordsworth (includes "The Solitary Reaper," "Yarrow Revisited," "The World Is Too Much with Us" and more) » Read Now
by William Wordsworth, William J. Rolfe. 250 pgs.

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3.

Wordsworth: Poetical Works: with Introduction and Notes (includes "Laodamia," "Intimations of Immortality," "Ode to Duty" and many more) » Read Now
by William Wordsworth, Thomas Hutchinson, Ernest De Selincourt. 779 pgs.

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This edition collects every piece of verse known to have been published by the poet himself, or of which he authorized the posthumous publication. Besides explanatory notes on the texts, the book includes the poet's own Notes to the 1849-50 edition and his Prefaces.
4.

The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems, 1797-1807 » Read Now
by John F. Danby. 152 pgs.

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...THE SIMPLE WORDSWORTH THE SIMPLE WORDSWORTH Studies in the Poems 1797-1807 by JOHN F. DANBY...page viii PROLOGUE 1 I. WORDSWORTH AND SIMPLICITY 15 II. THREE LYRICAL...
5.

Gender, Transgression, and the Two Wordsworths in "Tintern Abbey", in Texas Studies in Literature and Language » Read Now
by Robert N. Essick. 15 pgs.

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...powerful self-consciousness of William Wordsworth. We can further refine our...second mode, identified with William Wordsworth and "the refusal of the poem...1989 ), xli...
6.

Revaluating Revolution and Radicalness in the 'Lyrical Ballads', in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 » Read Now
by Yu Liu. 15 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986). 2 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850...p. 58. 4 Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth, A Biography: The Early Years...p. 26. 6...
7.

Dorothy and William Wordsworth » Read Now
by Catherine Macdonald MacLean. 134 pgs.

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...AS LYRIC POETS DOROTHY AND WILLIAM WORDSWORTH CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS...rights reserved DOROTHY AND WILLIAM WORDSWORTH By CATHERINE MACDONALD...III. III. DOROTHY AND...
8.

The Poet Wordsworth » Read Now
by Helen Darbishire. 182 pgs.

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...procedure. And Lowell remarked, William Wordsworth, Esq. of Rydal Mount is one person, and the William Wordsworth he so heartily reverenced...1 The Lake Poets: William...
9.

Wordsworth and the Motions of the Mind » Read Now
by Gordon Kent Thomas. 234 pgs.

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10.

The Romantic Dream: Wordsworth and the Poetics of the Unconscious » Read Now
by Douglas B. Wilson. 206 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Psychology, Entire Library

Douglas B. Wilson's book traces the wide web of connections that the Romantics wove between dreams and other expressions of consciousness: sensation, emotions, illusions, creativity, personality, and memory.
11.

Politics and the Poet; A Study of Wordsworth » Read Now
by F. M. Todd. 238 pgs.

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12.

Guilty Pleasures: William Wordsworth's Poetry of Psychoanalysis » Read Now
by Richard D. McGhee. 352 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Psychology, Entire Library

"McGhee . . . offers a psychoanalytic reading of Wordsworth's entire poetic ouevre that is clear, reasonably sensitive to aesthetic considerations, and an interesting challenge to more conventional interpretations of the poet."—CHOICE
13.

Judge Her Gently': Passion and Rebellion in Wordsworth's Laodamia, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language » Read Now
by Judith W. Page. 16 pgs.

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...as passionate as the young William Wordsworth himself had been in the early...Poems, 1807-1820 , by William Wordsworth , ed. Carl H. Ketcham...used The Poetical Works of...
14.

Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning » Read Now
by Martin Bidney. 238 pgs.

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...Criticism and interpretation. Wordsworth, William, 1770-1850--Criticism and...Wordsworthian Epiphanies William Wordsworth devoted most of his finest...Dejection: An Ode,"...
15.

Providence and Love: Studies in Wordsworth, Channing, Myers, George Eliot, and Ruskin » Read Now
by John W. Beer. 335 pgs.

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These studies are connected by common underlying themes: the sense of Providence, the growing awareness of its loss in the nineteenth century and the pressure on the ideal of Romantic love as that came increasingly to be treated as a substitute. Other questions are raised. Were Wordsworth's `Lucy'...
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These studies are connected by common underlying themes: the sense of Providence, the growing awareness of its loss in the nineteenth century and the pressure on the ideal of Romantic love as that came increasingly to be treated as a substitute. Other questions are raised. Were Wordsworth's `Lucy' poems simply Romantic fictions, or did they mask the memory of an actual youthful attachment? What was the story behind the secret message which F. W. H. Myers left with the Society for Psychical Research, hoping to transmit it after his death? And what was it about the young Cambridge men George Eliot met in 1872 that made them particularly attractive to her? Investigation of these and other matters has led to close scrutiny of various manuscripts in British and American libraries, certain of which, including some letters of George Eliot recently discovered in Cambridge, are reproduced here for the first time.
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16.

Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics: The Art and Psychology of Self-Representation » Read Now
by Leon Waldoff. 1761 pgs.

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Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics explores the identity, role, and subjectivity of the speaker in Wordsworth s finest and best-known longer lyrics -- "Tintern Abbey", "Resolution and Independence", "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", and "Elegiac Stanzas". Because Wordsworth is the most autobiographical...
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Wordsworth in His Major Lyrics explores the identity, role, and subjectivity of the speaker in Wordsworth s finest and best-known longer lyrics -- "Tintern Abbey", "Resolution and Independence", "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", and "Elegiac Stanzas". Because Wordsworth is the most autobiographical poet of the romantic period, and perhaps in the English language, readers naturally take the speaker to be the poet himself or, as Wordsworth says in his prefaces and essays, "the poet in his own person".
Some readers allow for a fictional dimension in the characterization of the speaker and refer to him as a persona; others treat him as a biographical self, defined in literary, political, historical, or cultural terms. Leon Waldorf examines the critical issues posed by these different understandings of the speaker's identity and argues for a conception of Wordsworth's lyrical "I" that deals with the dramatic and psychological complexities of the speaker's act of self-representation.
Taking concepts from Freud and Winnicott, this book presents a psychoanalytic model for defining the speaker and conceptualizing his subjectivity. Waldorf suggests that the lyrical "I" in each poem is a transitional self of the poet. The poem offers, in the suspended moment and cultural space of lyrical form, a self-dramatization in which the speaker attempts to act out, in the sense of both performing and attempting to achieve, a reconstitution and transformation of the self.
In a series of close readings that provide formalistic and psychological analysis, the book shows that the major lyrics contain compelling evidence that Wordsworth devoted much of his poetic art to each speaker's act ofself-dramatization. The various strategies that each speaker employs and the self-dramatizing character of his utterance are theorized and assimilated into an understanding of the subjectivity he represents.
Waldorf concludes that Word
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