William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was one of the leading figures of the Romanticism movement and friends with another influential English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Xanadu. The two then went on to collaborate and came up with one of the best known works of the period, Lyrical Ballads, which was published in 1798.

The ideals of the Romanticism school which Wordsworth belonged to reverenced nature and the imaginative spirit of an individual. For this very same reason, it is not surprising that where he was born inspired the lifelong love for nature, and it is believed that the same even influenced his studies and artwork in a later stage. He was born to John Wordsworth and his wife in the lake district of Cockermouth in Cumberland, in the year 1770.

The young William Wordsworth spent many hours of his youth outdoors, admiring the beautiful countryside. It is, hence, a matter of very little doubt that his poems and work always sing the beauty of nature and the serene atmospheric places on earth. However, it has always been a matter of debate what Wordsworth referred nature as.

In a young age, tragedy struck the Wordsworth family. Both William’s mother and father died when he was young. He remained very close to his sister Dorothy for the rest of his life. Dorothy Wordsworth suffered from an undisclosed mental illness. William Wordsworth did not go through a lengthy struggling writer period, as most authors do when trying to break into print for the first time. In 1795, he received an inheritance of property / assets that put him in a much better financial position and probably saved him from an impressive list of odd jobs that appear in the biographies of most modern novelists.

During his early twenties, he attended Cambridge University where he happened to meet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He there sold his first published piece to The European Magazine while attending Cambridge and he went on a walking tour around France and Switzerland after his graduation. Wordsworth earned a B.A. at Cambridge University. He married Marry Hutchison in 1802. The couple took care of his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, until her death in 1822.

The details of the life of a writer may help readers better understand a writer’s works by providing the details of environment of the writer written by him. The collected works of a writer give us the best idea of what a writer believed and the things he valued during his day. His best known work was completed in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and it is known as Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth’s contribution to Lyrical Ballads deals with natural subjects, while Coleridge’s contribution dealt with the psychological impact of the supernatural. More than one critic has observed that Wordsworth wrote the poems that appear in Lyrical Ballads to appeal to wide audience. Literary critics believe that certain rules must be followed to produce a good work of art, but critics who insist that rules be followed strictly misunderstand the nature of a literary genius. Many literary geniuses and other excellent writers follow standard composition rules, but the best literary geniuses know when to break the rules to produce better works of art. Wordsworth was by no means the first writer to break established rules for good composition, nor will he be the last. Shakespeare ignored many rules for producing many good plays and Mark Twain ignored the advice of critics when he wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Perhaps, by turning to the words of man himself, we can better understand William Wordsworth. Some of his quotes contain a good amount of humor. “Golf is a day spent in strenuous idleness,” he once observed. Many modern readers still fail to understand what the appeal of hitting a ball with a metal club can relate to. More worthwhile, Wordsworth’s quotes tell of mankind’s relationship to nature and to himself. Statements such as “Nature never did betray the man that loved her,” and “The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind,” show not only a man who had respect for the world around him but also the wisdom that comes from observation of himself and others.

Although William Wordsworth became a poet laureate of England in 1843 and held several minor government posts such as being responsible for distributing stamps in his later years, the height of his critical acclaim started with Lyrical Ballads and ended in 1807. Wordsworth continued to write throughout his life, but his later works never gained the same level of critical acclaim. He would follow a course in his life that Winston Churchill described later with the words, “If you’re not liberal when you’re old, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re old, you have no head.” The passionate writings of the younger Wordsworth were replaced with more measured conservative and patriotic pieces of poetry.

Wordsworth did not write his books in obscurity only to be discovered later like Herman Melville, nor was he taken advantage of like Edgar Allan Poe. Wordsworth is considered as a leader of the Romanticism Movement, but other writers of the period are better known to modern readers. His friend Coleridge is a name better known to modern readers because of the supernatural themes present in his poems. Tennyson and Byron are popular for different reasons – Tennyson for the work ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and Byron for his romantic poetry. Even if he is not the most well known poet of the Romantic school, he remains one of its most influential authors.

It is strange that a figure as influential as Wordsworth has not achieved greater recognition among modern readers and that his name is only best known to academicians. “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come,” best exemplifies the beliefs of the man and the artistic movement that he led.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworthhttp://www.online-literature.com/wordsworth/

http://www.online-literature.com/wordsworth/lyrical-ballads-1798/

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/william_wordsworth.html