WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland, and educated at Hawkshead Grammar School between Esthwaite Water and Windermere in the Lake District, with which his whole life was closely connected. At St. John's College, Cambridge, according to his own account, he was neither among the loyal students faithful to their books,' nor among the 'honest dunces,' but one of the half-and-half idlers' who 'read lazily in trivial books,' amused themselves with athletic sports, and let the stars Come forth, perhaps, without one quiet thought.' In recollection, Wordsworth probably exaggerated his youthful idleness, for he read extensively, in both classical and modern languages, but he was not for that hour, nor for that place,' and he undoubtedly profited more, intellectually and spiritually, by his vacations in the Lake District and in France. He became a warm sympathizer with the French revolutionary movement, which deeply stirred his imagination. The declaration of war between France and England and the Reign of Terror in France cast him into deep melancholy, but he clung to his revolutionary principles until the Napoleonic despotism finally threw him back into agreement with his conservative fellow-countrymen.

In this spiritual crisis Wordsworth owed much to the companionship of his sister Dorothy, with whom he decided to retire from the world and devote himself to 'plain living and high thinking. A legacy of £900 from a young admirer (Raisley Calvert) enabled the Wordsworths, who were living in the Lake District on milk and potatoes, to carry out this resolution, and in 1795 they took a cottage at Racedown, in Worcestershire, where they were visited by Coleridge. In the autumn of 1797 the three friends took a long walk together in the Quantock Hills; and to pay the expenses of the excursion, the young men planned a small volume of poetry, which was published the following year by an obscure Bristol printer under the title of Lyrical Ballads. Containing Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth's Lines written above Tintern Abbey, it marked very distinctly the two new streams of influence which were to enrich English poetry throughout the nineteenth century, and it has come to be regarded as one of the most important events in the history of literature, although at the time it attracted little attention. In the same year (1798) the Wordsworths and Coleridge sailed for Germany, where the latter plunged deep into the study of German literature and philosophy, while Wordsworth began the composition of The Prelude, an account of his own poetical and spiritual development, which was finished in 1805, although withheld from publication until after his death.

In 1799 Wordsworth and his sister settled permanently in the Lake District, their home for the next nine years being Dove Cottage, Grasmere. In 1800 the payment of a long deferred debt to the family enabled Wordsworth to marry a lifelong friend, Mary Hutchison, sung by him in 'She was a phantom of delight' and other poems. In 1813 he was given a government sinecure as distributor of stamps, which brought him in £400 a year, and he was able to remove to a larger house at Rydal Mount, where he stayed until his death. Most of his work now recognized as of the highest excellence was published by 1807, though his longest poem, The Excursion, appeared in 1814; The White Doe of Rylstone and Laodamia in 1815; The Waggoner and Peter Bell in 1819; the fine series of sonnets, The River Duddon, in 1820; and a less successful sequence, Ecclesiastical Sketches, in 1822. On the death of Southey in 1843, he was appointed Poet Laureate, and was in turn succeeded by Tennyson, who received the laurel greener from the brow, Of him who uttered nothing base.'

Wordsworth's most obvious service to English poetry was to free it from the bondage/ of the artificial diction which the school of Pope received as a tradition and hardened into a convention Subsequent ages owe him a greater debt for opening their minds to truer and deeper relations with Nature, and their hearts to sympathy with simple things and simple people. But his greatest gift was neither a theory of diction nor a system of philosophy, but the union of high imaginative powers with a rare faculty of expression, which enabled him to enrich English poetry with priceless treasures. Matthew Arnold's conviction that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is after that of Shakspere and Milton undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time' has been confirmed by the judgment of later critics.

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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

PREFACE TO LATER ISSUES
OF LYRICAL BALLADS'

taste is healthy or depraved; which, again, could not be determined, without pointing out, in what manner language and the human mind act and react on 5 each other, and without retracing the revolutions, not of literature alone, but likewise of society itself. I have therefore altogether declined to enter regularly upon this defense; yet I am sensible, that there would be some impropriety in abruptly obtruding upon the public, without a few words of introduction, poems duction, poems so materially different from those upon which general approba15 tion is at present bestowed.

The first volume of these poems has already been submitted to general perusal. It was published as an experiment, which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the 10 real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a poet may rationally endeavor to impart.

I had formed no very inaccurate estimate of the probable effect of those poems: I flattered myself that they who should be pleased with them would read them with more than common pleasure; 20 and, on the other hand, I was well aware, that by those who should dislike them, they would be read with more than common dislike. The result has differed from my expectation in this 25 only, that a greater number have been pleased than I ventured to hope I should please.

Several of my friends are anxious for the success of these poems from a be- 30 lief, that, if the views with which they were composed were indeed realized, a class of poetry would be produced well adapted to interest mankind permanently, and not unimportant in the quality and 35 in the multiplicity of its moral relations: and on this account they have advised me to add a systematic defense of the theory upon which the poems were written. But I was unwilling to undertake the task, 40 because I knew that on this occasion the reader would look coldly upon my arguments, since I might be suspected of having been principally influenced by the selfish and foolish hope of reasoning 45 him into an approbation of these particular poems: and I was still more unwilling to undertake the task, because, adequately to display my opinions, and fully to enforce my arguments, would 5 require a space wholly disproportionate to a preface. For to treat the subject with the clearness and coherence of which it is susceptible, it would be necessary to give a full account of the 55 present state of the public taste in this country, and to determine how far this

It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association; that he not only thus apprises the reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded. This exponent or symbol held forth by metrical language must in different eras of literature have excited very different expectations: for example, in the age of Catullus, Terence, and Lucretius, and that of Statius or Claudian; and in our own country, in the age of Shakspere and Beaumont and Fletcher, and that of Donne and Cowley, or Dryden, or Pope. I will not take upon me to determine the exact import of the promise which by the act of writing in verse an author, in the present day, makes to his reader; but it will undoubtedly appear to many persons that I have not fulfilled the terms of an engagement thus voluntarily contracted. They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to inquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. I hope therefore the reader will not censure me, for attempting to state what I have proposed to myself to perform; and also (as far as the limits of a preface will permit) to explain some of the chief reasons which have determined me in the choice of my purpose: that at least he may be spared any unpleasant feeling of disappoint