William Wordsworth

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Wordsworth, William,
1770
1850, English poet, b. Cockermouth, Cumberland. One of the great Englishpoets, he was a leader of the r
omantic movement in England.

Life and Works

In 1791 he graduated from Cambridge and traveled abroad. While in France he fell in love with Annette V
allon, who bore hima daughter, Caroline, in 1792. Although he did not marry her, it seems to have been ci
rcumstance rather than lack of affectionthat separated them. Throughout his life he supported Annette an
d Caroline as best he could, finally settling a sum of moneyon them in 1835.
The spirit of the French Revolution had strongly influenced Wordsworth, and he returned (1792) to Englan
d imbued with theprinciples of Rousseau and republicanism. In 1793 were published An Evening Walk an
d Descriptive Sketches, written in thestylized idiom and vocabulary of the 18th cent. The outbreak of the
Reign of Terror prevented Wordsworth's return to France,and after receiving several small legacies, he se
ttled with his sister Dorothy in Dorsetshire. Wordsworth was extraordinarilyclose to his sister. Throughout
his life she was his constant and devoted companion, sharing his poetic vision and helpinghim with his wo
rk.
In Dorsetshire Wordsworth became the intimate friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

and, probably under his influence, astudent of David Hartley

's empiricist philosophy. Together the two poets wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798), in which they sought touse t
he language of ordinary people in poetry; it included Wordsworth's poem "Tintern Abbey." The work introd
ucedromanticism

into England and became a manifesto for romantic poets. In 1799 he and his sister moved to the Lake Di
strictof England, where they lived the remainder of their lives. A second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (180
0), which included acritical essay outlining Wordsworth's poetic principles, in particular his ideas about po
etic diction and meter, was unmercifullyattacked by critics.
In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, an old school friend; the union was evidently a happy one,
and the couplehad four children. The Prelude, his long autobiographical poem, was completed in 1805, t
hough it was not published untilafter his death. His next collection, Poems in Two Volumes (1807), includ
ed the well-known "Ode to Duty," the "Ode:Intimations of Immortality," and a number of famous sonnets.
Thereafter, Wordsworth's creative powers diminished. Nonetheless, some notable poems were produced
after this date,including The Excursion (1814), "Laodamia" (1815), "White Doe of Rylstone" (1815), Memo
rials of a Tour of the Continent,1820 (1822), and "Yarrow Revisited" (1835). In 1842 Wordsworth was give
n a civil list pension, and the following year, havinglong since put aside radical sympathies, he was name
d poet laureate.

Assessment
Wordsworth's personality and poetry were deeply influenced by his love of nature, especially by the sights
and scenes of theLake Country, in which he spent most of his mature life. A profoundly earnest and sinc
ere thinker, he displayed a highseriousness comparable, at times, to Milton's but tempered with tendernes
s and a love of simplicity.
Wordsworth's earlier work shows the poetic beauty of commonplace things and people as in "Margaret," "
Peter Bell,""Michael," and "The Idiot Boy." His use of the language of ordinary speech was heavily criticiz
ed, but it helped to rid Englishpoetry of the more artificial conventions of 18th-
century diction. Among his other well-
known poems are "Lucy" ("She dweltamong the untrodden ways"), "The Solitary Reaper," "Resolution an
d Independence," "Daffodils," "The Rainbow," and thesonnet "The World Is Too Much with Us."
Although Wordsworth was venerated in the 19th cent., by the early 20th cent. his reputation had declined.
He was criticizedfor the unevenness of his poetry, for his rather marked capacity for bathos, and for his tr
ansformation from an open-
mindedliberal to a cramped conservative. In recent years, however, Wordsworth has again been recogniz
ed as a great English poeta profound, original thinker who created a new poetic tradition.

Bibliography
See his poetical works, ed. by E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire (5 vol., 1940
49); his prose works, ed. by W. J. B. Owenand J. W. Smyser (3 vol., 1974); correspondence with his siste
r, ed. by E. de Selincourt (6 vol., 1967
82); biographies by M.Moorman (2 vol., 1965), S. Gill (1984), K. R. Johnston (1999), and J. Barker (rev. e
d. 2005); studies by M. Reed (1967), F. E.Halliday (1970), R. Rehder (1981), J. K. Changler (1984), P. Ha
milton (1986), A. J. Bewell (1989), D. Bromwich (1999), andA. Potkay (2012); G. McMaster, William Word
sworth: A Critical Anthology (1973); A. Sisman, The Friendship: Wordsworthand Coleridge (2007).
Dorothy Wordsworth
Wordsworth's sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, 1771
1855, is known principally for her poems and for her journals, which haveproved invaluable for later biogr
aphies and studies of the poet. These journals, the first of which was started in 1798, arewritten in delicat
e, exquisite diction, and describe the Wordsworth household, friends, and travels. For the last 20 years of
her life Dorothy Wordsworth was an invalid, suffering from an obscure illness that made her prematurely s
enile.

Bibliography
See her journals, ed. by H. Darbishire (2 vol., 1958; rev. ed. 1971, ed. by M. Moorman, repr. 1991); biogr
aphy by E. deSelincourt (1933); A. M. Ellis, Rebels and Conservatives: Dorothy and William Wordsworth
and Their Circle (1967); E.Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal (1974); F. Wilson, The Ballad of Dorothy Wo
rdsworth (2009).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia Copyright 2013, Columbia University Press. Licensed from
Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically bi
ased.

Wordsworth, William

Born Apr. 7, 1770, at Cock-ermouth; died Apr. 23, 1850, at Rydal Mount, near Gras-
mere, Westmorland. English poet.
Wordsworth graduated from Cambridge University. He experienced the influence of the Great French Rev
olution andsympathized with the victims of the agrarian-
industrial revolution in Britain (the narrative poem Guilt and Sorrow, 1793-
94). Atthe end of the 1790s Wordsworth established close relations with S. Coleridge and R. Southey, an
d they formed anassociation based on mutually shared ideas, known as the Lake School. In 1798, Words
worth and Cole-
ridge jointlypublished the collection Lyrical Ballads; the foreword to the second edition of this collection (1
800) became the aestheticmanifesto of conservative romanticism. Having broken away from the classicist
standards of the 18th century, Wordsworthwrote about the ruination of the centuries-
old bases of peasant life in his ballads, which are permeated with sincere feeling(We Are Seven, The Brot
hers), he conveyed the thoughts of simple laborers, the natural beauty of his country (LinesWritten in Ea
rly Spring) and the strength of love (Lucy). Wordsworth wrote poems about the Negroes who had revolte
d inHaiti and about the Tirolean peasants who were struggling against Napoleon (the cycle Sonnets Dedi
cated to Liberty, 1802-
16); this same cycle also included officially patriotic poems. With the passing years Wordsworth became
more and moreinclined to take conservative positions: for example, in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822) h
e represented the history of Europeas a change in religious doctrines. In his autobio-
graphical narrative poem The Prelude (1850), Wordsworth rejected theradicalism of his youth. In 1843 he
received the title of poet laureate.
WORKS
Poetical Works. London, 1956.
Literary Criticism. London, 1966.
In Russian translation:
In S. Ia. Marshak. Sobr. soch., vol. 3. Moscow, 1959.
REFERENCES
Elistratova, A. A. Nasledie angliiskogo romantizma i sovremennost. Moscow, 1960.
Rader, M. Wordsworth: A Philosophical Approach. [Oxford] 1967.
Sneath, E. H. Wordsworth: Poet of Nature and Poet of Man. Port Washington, N. Y., 1967.
Moorman, M. W. Wordsworth: A Biography, vols. 1-2. Oxford, 1957-65.
Peek, K. M. Wordsworth in England. New York, 1969.
B. A. GILENSON