William Wordsworth is poet of nature.

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Ashley Kannan | Certified Educator

The previous posts were quite lucid in their explanation.  I would suggest that there is a
thematic reason as to why Wordsworth is a poet of nature, as well.  Part of the driving force
behind the Romantic thinkers, of which Wordsworth is an essential component, was to
create a realm that was different than the preceding literary movement, the Neoclassicists. 
The Romantics wanted to conceive of a setting which was not entirely urban, did not...

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coachingcorner | Certified Educator

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epollock | Student

qurria,

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) teamed with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772−1834) to

produce the Lyrical Ballads. In Lyrical Ballads, these two writers achieved something quite
rare in English literature—a collaborative work of creation. English literature from Chaucer
forward is rooted in the individual sensibility, but in this volume, two geniuses merged
gloriously. At the time they produced Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth and Coleridge were also
part of a larger group called the Lake Poets. Nature and redefinitions of nature are at the
heart of the Romantic revival, and nature itself is, perhaps, nowhere more beautiful than in
the region of England known as the lake country.

Wordsworth was born in the Lake District; both his parents died when he was still young.
According to his autobiographical poem The Prelude, William was allowed to run wild in
nature, which became for him a kind of mother. Throughout his poetry, we see a pantheistic
refrain: God inheres in the natural world around us. God is in nature.

William was educated at grammar school, but he tells us in The Prelude that there was much
loneliness in his childhood. One notes in this poem what Keats called the “egotistic sublime”;
Wordsworth was obsessed with himself, but this obsession is part of the Romantic project.
Wordsworth’s early circumstances rendered him extraordinarily introverted, and a solitude
with nature was a vital element in his psychological makeup.

Another of his most famous poems, “Daffodils,” opens with the line “I wandered lonely as a
Cloud.” Loneliness within a natural world and creativity from the natural world are at the
heart of Wordsworth’s poetry, and loneliness, for him, is a creative state. Reconnecting with
society is one of the great problems in the Wordsworthian view of the poetic role because the
poet, of course, cannot stay forever alone.

Wordsworth attended Cambridge University and experienced his first major intellectual
stimulus on a visit to France, at the crest of the early revolutionary period in 1790. In the
early 1800s, Wordsworth settled in the Lake District with his sister and muse, Dorothy, and
began to devote himself seriously to poetry. In 1795, he had met Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
whose muse was both more philosophical and wilder than  Wordsworth’s: opium and
Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher fed that imagination. The fruit of the
relationship between Coleridge and Wordsworth was the collaborative volume Lyrical
Ballads, first published in 1798. It was reissued with a manifesto preface by Wordsworth in
1800 and again with an expanded introduction in 1802.

Although it’s a slim volume, Lyrical Ballads may be the most influential book of poetry in
English literature. It acted as a bomb under the sedate establishment of verse, which had
been erected so formally and carefully by the Augustans. The book was originally published
without names, as if it were a production, not of individual talent, but of the spirit of the
time.

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