WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1840) - Life, Features, Themes

Education: Grammar school of Hawkshead and then he took the degree at St John's College of Cambridge in 1798.

Journeys: he went on a walking tour in France, Switzerland and Germany (France 1 year).

Politics: A fervent supporter of the French Revolution later he turned to political and religious convervatorism (disillusioned by the period of terror).

Love: in France William met Anne Vallon and he fell in love with her. They had a child and he wanted to marry her, but he was constricted by his family to return in England. In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson (5 children).

Profession: Poet even if he never worked methodically. In 1843 he was made Poet Laureate.

Friendship: he became friend with Samuel Coleridge who he met in 1795. They shared the same love for nature and for long walks. But after a long quarrel their friendship was broke.

Decay: his sense of decay that characterized the last part of his life was caused by the death of 1 of his brothers and of 2 of his children and by the quarrel with Coleridge.

Features

Subject of poetry: to chose incident and situation of common life.

Language: a selection of language really used by men the language of simple and humble people. Though he revivified poetic diction by rejecting the artificial circumlocution considered obligatory by neoclassical canon of tastily the language of his best poems is not always as simple as the theories demand.

Poetry: it is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings it takes origin from emotions recollected  in tranquility (memory).

Poet: he stand apart from the other men because he has a higher degree of sensibility and imaginative capacity and he has also the tasks to purify men's emotions moral teacher.

Imagination: the capacity of colouring to modify the objects observed.

Sources: W. was influenced by Rousseau (for his theory on childhood) and by David Hartley (who gave his theories from "Opticks" of Newton) he said that no ideas are innate in man but they derived all from the impression of external objects that produced at 1^st simple ideas and then, with "power of association", these ideas were transformed into more complex ones. Hartley believed that the stages of mind's development corresponded to the 3 age of man:

Childhood (only sensation from external world)

Youth ( sensation created emotion and simple ideas)

Manhood(organization of simple ideas into complex ones)

For Hartley the passage "sensation-simple ideas-complex and organized ideas" is a mechanical process, instead Wordsworth was convinced that we can also re-create the 1^st impression by enriching simple impression with the power of imagination (this was connected with his consideration of poetry).

Themes

Childhood: the most important stage of man's life. Our souls come from God, from a divine celestial state where he enjoyed a particular visionary faculty, which may be identified with the imagination. When we are born we are not entirely forgetful of this pre-existence, but while in infancy and in childhood the memory of it is relatively strong, since the child is closest to his divine origin, it fades away when he grows up, since maturity, with its cares and habits, carries us further away from it. Through nature, the adult, who his child's heir, can remember his heavenly state and rediscover God. The child sees with more imagination and vivid perception than the adult. The child becomes father of the man the poet (an adult) is happy when he sees a rainbow, and he used to be in his childhood. It is in childhood that man established a perfect communion with nature, which he later he later perceives die away as he grows up.

Memory- meditation happy moments of childhood.

Like Rousseau he believed that the state of childhood was closest to the ideal state of nature and therefore the least corrupt. But Wordsworth went beyond Rousseau and adopted Plato's idea that soul exists in a heavenly state before birth(our life is but a sleep).

Nature: Wordsworth is regarded as the English nature poet but his poems contain very little natural descriptions. He was the poet of the relationship between Man and Nature. They are different but inseparable parts of a whole universe, a total scheme created by God or mighty power. Nature is endowed with a spirit and a life of her own present not only in plants and animals but also in inanimate objects as well (stone and other). She was therefore a living presence speaking to all those who were able to enter into intimate relationship with nature and understand her language (Pantheist vision).

Man could rediscover the image of God and became aware in his inner life. Nature was a friend and a comforter to man. The mission of the poet was to open man's soul to the inner reality of nature and to the meditative joy she can offer.

Works

Lyrical Ballads: written with Coleridge. Wordsworth wanted in this book to:

to draw inspiration from everyday life.

to exalt the glory of senses

to write in a language as near as possible to the actual spoken English.

The Prelude: he traced the growth of his mind from his early childhood experience up to his decision to devote his own life to literature.

Poems in 2 volumes: included a lot of famous sonnet and odes.

The Excursion was a part of the poem on "Man, Nature and society"