William Wordworth – as a poet

Onderstaand het artikel is afkomstig uit Chambers’s cyclopædia of English Literature, uitgebracht 1886.

William Wordsworth, the most original of modern poets, was a native of Cockermouth, in the county of Cumberland, where he was born on the 7th of April 1770. His father was law-agent to Sir James Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale, but died when the poet was in his seventh year. William and hos brother – Dr Christopher Wordsworth, long master of Trinity College – after being some years at Hawkshead School, in Lancashire, were sent by their uncles to the university of Cambridge. William was entered of St. John’s in 1787. Having finished his academical course, and taken his degree, he travelled for a short time. In the autumn of 1790, he accomplished a tour on the continent in company with a fellow-student, Mr. Robert Jones. ‘We went staff in hand,’he said, ‘without knapsacks, and carrying each his needments tied up in a pocket handkerchief, with about £20 a piece in our pockets.’ With this friend, Wordsworth made a tour in North Wales the following year, after taking his degree in college. He was again in France towards the close of the year 1791, and remained in that country about a twelvemonth. He had hailed the French Revolution with feelings of enthusiastic admiration.

Few poets escaped the contagion. Burns, Coleridge, Southey, and Campbell all felt the flame, and looked for a new era of liberty and hapiness. It was long ere Wordsworth abandoned his political theory. His freiends were desirous he should enther the church, but his republican sentiments and the unsettled state of his mind rendered him averse to such a step. To the profession of the law he was equally opposed. Poetry was to be the sole business of his life. A young friend, Raisley Calvert, dying in 1795, left him a sum of £900. ‘Upon the interest of the £900,’ he says, £400 being laid out in annuity, with £200 deducted from the principal, and £100 more which the Lyrical Ballads brought me, my sister and I contrived to live seven years, nearly eight.’ A further sum of £1000 came to him as part of the estate of his father, who had died intestate; and with this small competence, Wordsworth devoted himself to study and seclusion. He first appeared as a poet in his tenwty-third year, 1793. The title of his work was Descriptive Sketches, which was followed the same year by Evening Walk. The walk is among the mountains of Westmoreland; the sketches refer to a tour made in Switzerland by the poet and his friend Jones. The poetry is of the style of Goldsmith; but description predominates over reflection. The enthusiastic dreams of liberty which then buoyed up the young poet, appear in such lines as the following:

In the autumn of 1795, Wordswirth and his siter were settled at Racedown Lodge, near Crewkerne in Somersetshire, where they were visited in the summer of 1797 by Coleridge. The poets were charmed with each other’s society, and became friends for life. Wordsworth and his sister next moved to a resicence near Coleridge’s at Alfoxden, near Nether Stowey. At this place many of his smaller poems were written, and also a tragedy, the Borderers, which he attempted to get acted at Covent Garden Theatre, but it was rejected. In 1798, appeared the Lyrical Ballade, to which Coleridge contributed his Ancient Mariner. A generous provincial bookseller, Joseph Cottle of Bristol, gave thirty guineas for the copyright of this volume’he ventured on an impression of five hundred copies, but was soon glad to dispose of the largest proportion of the five hundred at a loss, to a London bookseller. The ballads were designed by their author as an experiment how far a simpler kind of poetry than that in use would afford permanent interest to readers. The humblest subjects, he contended, were fit for poetry, and the language should be that ‘really used by men.’ The fine fabric of poetic diction which generations of the tunefull tribe had been laboriously rearing, he proposed to destroy altogether. The language of humble and rustic life, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, he considered to be a more permanent and far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets. The attempt of Wordsworth was either totally neglected or assailed with ridicule. The transition from the refined end sentimental school of verse, with select and polished diction, to such themes as The Idiot Boy, and a style of composition disfigured by colloquial plainness, and by the mixture of ludicrous images and associations with passages of tenderness and pathos, was too violent to escape ridicule or insure general success. It was often impossible to tell whether the poet meant to be comic or tender, serious or ludicrous; while the choice of his subjects and illustrations, instead of being regarded as genuine simplicity, had an appearance of silliness or affection. The faults of his wordt ballads were so glaring, that they overpowered, at least for a time, the simple natural beauties, the spirit of gentleness and humanity, with which they were accompanied. It was a first experiment, and it was made without any regard for existing prejudices or feelings, or any wish to concilate.

In 1798, Wordsworth, his sister, and Coleridge went to Germany, the latter parting frim them at Hamburg, and going to Ratzeburg, where he resided four months; while the Wordworths proceeded to Goslar, and remained there about half a year. On their return to England, they settled at Grasmere, in Westmoreland, where they lived for eight years. In 1800 he reprinted his Lyrical Ballads, with the addition of many new pieces, the work now forming two volumes. In October 1802, the poet was married to Mary Hutchinson, a lady with whom he had been early intimate, and on whom he wrote, in the third year of his married life, the exquisite lines, ‘She was a Phantom of Delight.’