WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

He was born in the Lake District (natural beauty that with the grand tour inspired "Nature poets"). that captured him with its sights, sounds and smells.

He had a regular education (Cambridge). He travelled to France. There he knew the Revolution and a girl, Annette Vallon, he had a daughter. He turned to England because of lack of money nervous breakdown.

He lived with his sister, Dorothy, best friend and supporter. He became friend of Coleridge (more fantastic )and worked with him thanks to his love for nature and ordinary subjects.

He collected a lot of poems in Lyrical Ballads (1789), added of a Preface on 1800 that was the manifesto of Romantic movement in Britain. In the Preface he explains his ideas about poetry.

The main setting and inspiration of his poems was nature.

He makes children and childhood the subjects of his poems ( they were closer to nature than men).

He married Mary Hutchiston and he had 5 children, his brother drew and two children died decline of his creative powers.

He was increasingly conservative. Lyrical Ballads are composed by Tintern Abbey, I wandered lonely as a cloud, Lucy poems, She dwelt among the untrodden ways + the Preface.

The Preface was his response to the general crisis in the social and literary of England. His ideas are:

-choice of an ordinary  subjects and language;

-poet like "man speaking to man", he has more imagination than others;

-pleasure;

- poetry like "spontaneous owerflow of powerful feelings emotions recollected in tranquillity".

Nature means:

-countryside, opposed to city, is solitary and silent pleasure.

-source of inspiration, he describes what the relationship between man and nature he is part of it.

-nature as life-force: god is nature but he has not pantheistic ideas.

His poetry is based on "emotion recollected in tranquillity", he bases his poetry on memory, he analyses past, present and future at the same time ( the pleasure of the present will be remembered in the future).