Wordsworth, William

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

wurdz'wurth, William (1770-1850), one of the greatest English poets. He was born at Cockermouth, England. As a boy he was strong-willed, headstrong, impulsive, and conceited. He left the University of Cambridge in 1791 after receiving the degree of bachelor. He spent several months in France, being in sympathy with the doctrine of democracy which was then advocated by the French Revolutionists. In 1797, with his only sister, Dorothy, he moved to Alfoxden in Somersetshire to be near Coleridge. Although Wordsworth and Coleridge were very unlike in character, they became intimate friends, and in 1798 Lyrical Ballads, their joint work, was published. In 1802 Wordsworth married his cousin, Mary Hutchinson, who had been a close friend since childhood. In 1814 his great poem, The Excursion, was published, and later Peter Bell, The White Doe of Rylstone, and Sonnets on the River Duddon appeared. Other principal works were Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, Ecclesastical Sonnets, and Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems. The University of Oxford conferred on him the honorary degree of D. C. L. in 1839, and four years later, on the death of Southey, he succeeded to the laureateship. Wordsworth was rightfully called "The Poet of Nature and Man." "To him nature was alive, not a mere dead mechanism." He believed that it was able to communicate with man. He did not present nature truthfully in all respects, however, for he always described the beauty and brightness, never darkness or cruelty. This characteristic is manifest in these lines from Ode on the Intimations of Immortality: The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep; No more shall grief of mine the season wrong. I hear the echoes through the mountains throng, The winds come to me from the fields of sleep, And all the earth is gay; Land and sea Give themselves up to jollity. In his poems little of the artificial and conventional style used by earlier poets was apparent. He wrote in a simple, natural way, presenting his characters as peasants and shepherds, not as kings and courtiers after the custom of his predecessors. His lyrics are exceedingly musical and pretty, setting forth with an exquisite touch the beauties of nature in every form. The charming simplicity and sprightliness of his verse is shown in the following stanza from his little poem To the Daffodil: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils,-- Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering, dancing in the breeze. His great love of nature is expressed in the following lines, the keynote of the beauty of the flower poems of this "high priest of nature:" To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. Coleridge once said to Wordsworth, "Since Milton I know of no poet with so many felicities and unforgettable lines and stanzas as you." Having thus observed Wordsworth's merits, it may be stated in all fairness that he is a writer of unequal performance. Much of his poetry is confessedly mediocre, and so obscures his finer poems and passages that Wordsworth is not so popularly known as he otherwise would be. See Lake School