William Wordsworth

by abdo Wed Apr 06, 2011 3:26 pm

William
Wordsworth

.

For
the Scottish composer, see William
Wordsworth (composer).

William Wordsworth
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] Portrait of William Wordsworth by Benjamin Robert Haydon ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]).
Born	7 April 1770(1770-04-07) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], England
Died	23 April 1850(1850-04-23) (aged 80) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], England
Occupation	Poet
Genres	Poetry
Literary movement	[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Notable work(s)	[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Poems in Two Volumes, The Excursion

William Wordsworth (7
April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
poet who, with Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
with the 1798 joint publication [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

Wordsworth's [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
is generally considered to be [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], a
semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a
number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it
was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] from 1843
until his death in 1850.

Early life

Main
article: Early
life of William Wordsworth

The second of five children
born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April
1770 in
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in
Cockermouth, Cumberland^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}—part
of the scenic region in northwest England, the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. His
sister, the poet and diarist [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two
were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who
became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805
when the ship of which he was Master, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] was wrecked
off the south coast of England; and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], the youngest, who
entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Their father was a legal representative of James
Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a
large mansion in the small town. Wordsworth, as with his siblings, had little
involvement with their father, and they would be distant with him until his
death in 1783.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Wordsworth's father, although
rarely present, did teach him poetry, including that of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
in addition to allowing his son to rely on his own father's library. Along with
spending time reading in Cockermouth, Wordsworth would also stay at his
mother's parents house in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
Cumberland. At
Penrith, Wordsworth was exposed to the moors. Wordsworth could not get along
with his grandparents and his uncle, and his hostile interactions with them
distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

After the death of their
mother, in 1778, John Wordsworth sent William to Hawkshead Grammar
School in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and Dorothy to live with relatives in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]; she and William
would not meet again for another nine years. Although Hawkshead was
Wordsworth's first serious experience with education, he had been taught to
read by his mother and had attended a tiny school of low quality in
Cockermouth. After the Cockermouth school, he was sent to a school in Penrith
for the children of upper-class families and taught by Ann Birkett, a woman who
insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included pursuing both
scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Wordsworth
was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at
the school that Wordsworth was to meet the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who would be his
future wife.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

Wordsworth made his debut as
a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine.
That same year he began attending St John's
College, Cambridge, and received his B.A. degree in 1791.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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 walking tour of Europe, during which he toured
the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] extensively, and
visited nearby areas of France,
Switzerland, and Italy.

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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]'s
tensions with France, he returned
alone to England
the next year.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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. In 1802, he visited Calais with his sister Dorothy and met
Annette and his daughter Caroline. The purpose of the visit was to pave the way
for his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson. Afterwards he wrote the poem
"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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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 strong suggestions that
Wordsworth may have been depressed and emotionally unsettled in the mid-1790s.^{[[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]}

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.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

First publication and Lyrical Ballads

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Wordsworth
in 1798, about the time he began [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

In his "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]", which
is called the "manifesto" of English Romantic criticism, Wordsworth
calls his poems "experimental." The year 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 met Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his
sister [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] moved to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], Somerset, just a few miles
away from Coleridge's home in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Together,
Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]),
an important work in the English Romantic
movement. The volume gave neither Wordsworth's nor Coleridge's name as
author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]", was published in the
work, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
had only Wordsworth listed as the author, and included a preface to the poems,
which was augmented significantly 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 18th-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth gives his famous
definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it
takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." A fourth and
final edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805.

The Borderers

In 1795–96, revised in 1842,
he wrote his only play, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], a
verse tragedy during the reign of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] when Englishmen
of the north country were in conflict with Scottish rovers.

Germany and move to the Lake District

Wordsworth, Dorothy and
Coleridge traveled to Germany
in the autumn of 1798. While Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the
trip, its main effect on Wordsworth was to produce homesickness.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
During the harsh winter of 1798–99, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], and, despite extreme
stress and loneliness, he began work on an autobiographical piece later titled The
Prelude. He wrote a number of famous poems, including "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]". He
and his sister moved back to England,
now to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in the Lake District, and this time with fellow poet [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] nearby.
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey came to be known as the "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]".^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Through this period, many of his poems revolve around themes of death,
endurance, separation and grief.

Marriage and children

In 1802, after Wordsworth's
return from his trip to France
with Dorothy to visit Annette and Caroline, Lowther's heir, William
Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, paid the ₤4,000 debt owed to Wordsworth's
father incurred through Lowther's failure to pay his aide.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Later that year, Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The following
year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, three of whom predeceased
William and Mary:

John
Wordsworth (18 June 1803–1875). Married four times:

Isabella
Curwen (d. 1848) had six children: Jane, Henry, William, John, Charles and
Edward.
Helen
Ross (d. 1854). No issue.
Mary
Ann Dolan (d. after 1858) had one daughter Dora (b.1858).
Mary
Gamble. No issue.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
(16 August 1804 – 9 July 1847). Married [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
in 1843.
Thomas
Wordsworth (15 June 1806 – 1 December 1812).
Catherine
Wordsworth (6 September 1808 – 4 June 1812).
William
"Willy" Wordsworth (12 May 1810–1883). Married Fanny Graham and
had four children: Mary Louisa, William, Reginald, 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
(1747–1822),^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
who was nearing the end of a thirty-years' peregrination from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], India,
through [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
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.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
(between Grasmere and Rydal Water) in 1813,
where he spent the rest of his life.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

The Prospectus

In 1814 he published [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] as the
second part of the three-part The Recluse. He had not completed the
first and third parts, and never would. He did, however, 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^{[[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]]} recognize 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 characterize
his early poetry (loss, death, endurance, separation and 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. Following
the death of his friend the painter [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in 1823, Wordsworth mended
relations with Coleridge.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
The two were fully reconciled by 1828, when they toured the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] together.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
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 honors

Wordsworth received an
honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
and the same honor from Oxford
University the next year.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
In 1842 the government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300 a
year. With the death in 1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became the Poet
Laureate. He initially refused the honour, saying he was too old, but accepted
when Prime Minister Robert Peel assured him "you shall have nothing
required of you" (he became the only laureate to write no official
poetry). When his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry came
to a standstill.

Death

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Gravestone
of William Wordsworth, [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

William Wordsworth died by
re-aggravating a case of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
on 23 April 1850, and was buried at St. Oswald's church in [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. His widow Mary
published his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] several
months after his death. Though this failed to arouse great interest in 1850, it
has since come to be recognized as his masterpiece.

Major works

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
with a Few Other Poems ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])
- "Simon
  Lee"
- "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"
- "Lines Written
  in Early Spring"
- "Expostulation and
  Reply"
- "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"
- "The
  Thorn"
- "Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern
  Abbey"
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
with Other Poems ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])
- Preface
  to the Lyrical Ballads
- "Strange
  fits of passion have I known"^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
- "She Dwelt among the Untrodden
  Ways"^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
- "Three
  years she grew"^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
- "A
  Slumber Did my Spirit Seal"^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
- "I
  travelled among unknown men"^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
- "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"
- "The
  Two April Mornings"
- "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"
- "The
  Ruined Cottage"
- "Michael"
- "The
  Kitten At Play"
Poems,
in Two Volumes ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])
- "Resolution
  and Independence"
- "I
  Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Also known as "Daffodils"
- "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"
- "Ode:
  Intimations of Immortality"
- "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"
- "The Solitary
  Reaper"
- "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"
- "Composed
  upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"
- "[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]"
- "The
  World Is Too Much with Us"

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])

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·

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
(1810)
Upon Westminster
bridge

by Hasbi.Rabi Mon Apr 18, 2011 2:49 pm

Really i like his language in poems and it can easily touches my soul
He is the most beautiful English poet for me

great information about him .. thnx 4 sharing it

by abdo Tue Apr 19, 2011 10:13 am

you are welcome
and this is our aim

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

Re: William Wordsworth

Re: William Wordsworth