Chapter 2 Wordsworth
William Wordsworth, the reprentative poet of the early romanticism, was born in 1770, in a lawyer's family at Cockermouth, Cumberland. His mother died when he was only eight. His father followed her six years later. The orphan was taken in charge by relatives, who nt him to school at Hawkshead in the beautiful lake district in Northwestern England. Here, the unroofed school of nature attracted him more than the classroom, and he learned more eagerly from flowers and hills and stars than from his books. So the child early cherished a love of nature, which he later expresd in his poetry.
He studied at Cambridge from 1787 to 1791. While at university, he associated with tho young Republicans who political enthusiasm had been roud by the French Revolution. In the years 1790-1792 he twice visited France. On his cond visit he became acquainted with Beaupuy, an army officer of the new-born Republic of France, who kindled the heart of the young Englishman with a spirit of revolt against all social iniquities and a sympathy for the poor, humble folk. Wordsworth joined the Gerondists, i.e. the moderate Republicans. But he was forced to return to England becau his relatives cut off his allowa
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nce.
In 1795, Wordsworth ttled, with his sister Dorothy, at Racedown in Somertshire. They lived a frugal life and Dorothy, as his confidante and inspirer, made him turn his eyes to "the face of nature" and take an interest in the peasants living in their neighbourhood. She also induced him to transform his obrvation of the landscape into the revelation of the beauty of nature in poetry, and thus "prerved the poet in him." Wordsworth wrote of her:
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"She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;
furnace And humble cares, and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love, and thought, and joy."
In 1797 he made friends with Coleridge. Then they lived together in the Quantock Hills, Somert, devoting their time to writing of poetry. In their partnership, Coleridge was to take up the "supernatural, or at least romantic" subjects, while Wordsworth was "to give t
he charm of novelty to things of every day." In 1798 they jointly published the "Lyrical Ballads". Coleridge's contribution was his masterpiece "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The majority of poems in this collection, however, were written by Wordsworth.
The publication of the "Lyrical Ballads" marked the break with the conventional poetical tradition of the 18th century, i.e., with classicism, and the beginning of the Romantic revival in England.
In the Preface to the "Lyrical Ballads", Wordsworth t forth his principles of poetry. As contrasted with the classicists who made reason, order and the old, classical traditions the criteria in their poetical creations, Wordsworth bad his own poetical principle on the premi that "all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling." He appealed directly to individual nsations, i.e., pleasure, excitement and enjoyment, as the foundation in the creation and appreciation of poetry. Poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." A poet's emotion extends from human affairs to nature, but emotion immediately expresd is as raw as wine newly bottled. Tranquil contemplation of an emotional experience matures the feeling and nsation, and makes
possible the creation of good poetry like the refining of old wine. The function of poetry lies in its power to give an unexpected splendour to familiar and commonplace things, to incidents and situations from common life just as a prism can give a ray of commonplace sunlight the manifold miracle of colour. Ordinary peasants, children, even outcasts, all may be ud as subjects in poetical creation. As to the language ud in poetry, Wordsworth "endeavoured to bring (his) language near to the real language of men", "by fitting to metrical arrangement a lection of the real language of men" to a state of vivid nsation. The principles helped to crumble the theoretical foundations of the classical school of English poetry and to inspire a new generation of poets. The Preface to the "Lyrical Ballads" rved as the manifesto of the English Romantic Movement in poetry.
With the establishment of the Jacobin dictatorship (May 1793-July 1794) and the ri of Napoleon (November 1799-April 1814) in France, Wordsworth's attitude towards the revolution changed and he gave up his former political enthusiasm. He retired to the northern lake district, first living at Grasmere and then at Rydal Mount. Here he lived in clusion for a full half century. He became a Tory and upheld the reactionary policy of th
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e British government. Then he accepted the office of a distributor of stamps and was made poet laureate. He was eighty when he died in 1850.
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey have often been mentioned as the "Lake Poets" becau they lived in the Lake District in the northwestern part of England. The three traverd the same path in politics and in poetry, beginning as radicals and closing as conrvatives.
Wordsworth lived a long life and wrote a lot of poems. He was at his best in descriptions of mountains and rivers, flowers and birds, children and peasants, and reminiscences of his own childhood and youth. As a great poet of nature, he was the first to find words for the most elementary nsations of man face to face with natural phenomena. The nsations are universal and old but, once expresd in his poetry, become charmingly beautiful and new. His deep love for nature runs through such short lyrics as "Lines Written in Early Spring", "To the Cuckoo", "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", "My Heart Leaps Up", "Intimations of Immortality" and "Lines Compod a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey". The last is called his "lyrical hymn of thanks to nature":
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汽化 "For nature then
(The coarr pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)dance flick
To me was all in all. — I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite: a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,紧急制动是什么
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye".
His poems of nature were written according to his own argument that "our continued influxes of feeling are directed and modified by our thoughts, which are indeed the reprentatives of all our past feelings." He stored up natural impressions and "thought lopatience什么意思
ng and deeply" over them before reproducing them in poetry. And then—
"The beauteous forms,
Through a long abnce, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
查询六级成绩 But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, nsation sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: —feelings, too,
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love." (Ibid)
Wordsworth's way of writing poetry is summed up by George Brandes thus: "He collects a winter store of bright summer moments."
Wordsworth was also a masterhand in arching and revealing the feelings of the common people. The themes of many of his poems were drawn from rural life and his characters belong to the lower class in the English countryside. This is so becau he was intimately acquainted with rural life and believed that in rural conditions man's elementary feelings find a better soil than in town life and can be better cultivated and strengthened in constant association with nature. Deep-rooted in his native soil, Wordsworth succeeded in drawing pathetic pictures of the labouring people ("The Solitary Reaper"), in depicting the naivety of simple peasant children ("We Are Seven") and in delineating with deep sympathy the sufferings of the poor, humble peasants ("Michael", "The Ruined Cottage", "Simon Lee", and "The Old Cumberland Beggar"). His "Lucy" poems are a ries of short pathetic lyrics on the theme of harmony between humanity and nature:
