"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]

Sunday, January 19, 2025

William Wordsworth - Tintern Abbey




'Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey'
by William Wordsworth



Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,
On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour
July 13, 1978

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

                                              These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations 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. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

                                                        If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
         How often has my spirit turned to thee!

   And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
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,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

                                            Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

- William Wordsworth

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Question: What kind of philosophical setting or understanding is Wordsworth using when composing "Tintern Abbey"?

ChatGPT

In Tintern Abbey, William Wordsworth’s philosophical setting can be understood through the lens of Romanticism, particularly its engagement with nature, emotion, and individual experience. Wordsworth’s reflections align with several key philosophical influences of the time:
  • Empiricism and Idealism: Wordsworth’s understanding of nature and the self is shaped by empirical experience and idealism, borrowing from philosophers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant. For Wordsworth, direct experience with nature is not just sensory but deeply connected to the mind’s interpretation of that experience. This process of integrating perception and contemplation is central to his poetry.
  • Transcendentalism and the Sublime: He draws on concepts of the sublime, where nature is a source of spiritual elevation. The power of nature to provoke deep emotional and metaphysical reflection aligns with thinkers like Edmund Burke (on the sublime) and Immanuel Kant (on the sublime and aesthetics). In the poem, nature is seen as not only a physical environment but also a moral and spiritual guide—a place of contemplation and self-realization.
  • Pantheism and Nature’s Role in the Divine: Wordsworth is often associated with a pantheistic view of nature, where nature embodies divine presence. This resonates with Spinoza’s ideas, in which God and nature are seen as interconnected. For Wordsworth, nature serves as a source of wisdom and renewal, providing a direct connection to the divine and the universal soul.
  • Romantic Individualism and the Self: The poem expresses Romantic themes of self-discovery, personal growth, and solitude, which reflect Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influence on individualism and nature’s role in personal development. The speaker’s reflection on his past experience with nature, his present understanding, and his future aspirations exemplifies the evolution of self-consciousness over time, a core tenet of Romantic thought.
  • Memory and the Past: Wordsworth also emphasizes memory as a central aspect of the self’s relationship with nature. The poem portrays the ability of memory to preserve and shape one’s experiences. This recalls Kantian ideas of how the mind structures experience, as well as Coleridge’s notion of the imagination as a mediating faculty between the empirical world and spiritual truths.

In summary, Tintern Abbey blends Romantic ideals with a philosophical empiricism grounded in sensory experience, an idealistic interpretation of nature, and an engagement with pantheistic spirituality. The poem reflects on how personal growth, memory, and a deeper spiritual connection with the natural world can lead to moral and emotional renewal, a theme central to Romanticism’s focus on individual experience and transcendence.


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Tintern, Wye Valley, Wales, England

Tintern (Welsh: Tyndyrn) is a village in the community of Wye Valley, on the west bank of the River Wye in Monmouthshire, Wales, close to the border with England, about 5 miles (8 km) north of Chepstow. It is popular with tourists, in particular for the scenery and the ruined Tintern Abbey. Modern Tintern has been formed by the coalescence of two historic villages: Tintern Parva, forming the northern end of the village, and Chapel Hill, which forms the southern end. The village is designated as a Conservation Area. In 2022 the community was renamed from "Tintern" to "Wye Valley" and had boundary changes.




Tintern Abbey (Welsh: Abaty Tyndyrn pronunciationⓘ) was founded on 9 May 1131 by Walter de Clare, Lord of Chepstow. It is situated adjacent to the village of Tintern in Monmouthshire, on the Welsh bank of the River Wye, which at this location forms the border between Monmouthshire in Wales and Gloucestershire in England. It was the first Cistercian foundation in Wales, and only the second in Britain (after Waverley Abbey).

The abbey fell into ruin after the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 16th century. Its remains have been celebrated in poetry and painting from the 18th century onwards. In 1984, Cadw took over responsibility for managing the site. Tintern Abbey is visited by approximately 70,000 people every year.[1]

History

Earliest history

The Monmouthshire writer Fred Hando records the tradition of Tewdrig, King of Glywysing who retired to a hermitage above the river at Tintern. He then emerged to lead his son's army to victory against the Saxons at Pont-y-Saeson, a battle in which he was killed.[2]

Cistercian foundations

Main article: Cistercians

The Cistercian Order was founded in 1098 at the abbey of Cîteaux. A breakaway faction of the Benedictines, the Cistercians sought to re-establish observance of the Rule of Saint Benedict. Considered the strictest of the monastic orders, they laid down requirements for the construction of their abbeys, stipulating that "none of our houses is to be built in cities, in castles or villages; but in places remote from the conversation of men. Let there be no towers of stone for bells, nor of wood of an immoderate height, which are unsuited to the simplicity of the order".[3] The Cistercians also developed an approach to the Benedictine requirement for a dual commitment to pray and work that saw the evolving of a dual community, the monks and the lay brothers, illiterate workers who contributed to the life of the abbey and to the worship of God through manual labour.[4] The order proved exceptionally successful and by 1151, five hundred Cistercian houses had been founded in Europe.[5] The Carta Caritatis (Charter of Love) laid out their basic principles, of obedience, poverty, chastity, silence, prayer, and work. With this austere way of life, the Cistercians were one of the most successful orders in the 12th and 13th centuries. The lands of the Abbey were divided into agricultural units or granges, on which local people worked and provided services such as smithies to the Abbey.

William Giffard, Bishop of Winchester introduced the first colony of Cistercian monks to England at Waverley, Surrey, in 1128. His first cousin, Walter de Clare, of the powerful family of Clare, established the second Cistercian house in Britain, and the first in Wales, at Tintern in 1131.[6] The Tintern monks came from a daughter house of Cîteaux, L'Aumône Abbey, in the diocese of Chartres in France.[7] In time, Tintern established two daughter houses, Kingswood in Gloucestershire (1139) and Tintern Parva, west of Wexford in southeast Ireland (1203).

First and second abbeys: 1131–1536

The present-day remains of Tintern are a mixture of building works covering a 400-year period between 1131 and 1536. Very little of the first buildings still survives today; a few sections of walling are incorporated into later buildings and the two recessed cupboards for books on the east of the cloisters are from this period. The church of that time was smaller than the present building, and slightly to the north.

Details of stonework, interior and exterior

The Abbey was mostly rebuilt during the 13th century, starting with the cloisters and domestic ranges, and finally the great church between 1269 and 1301. The first mass in the rebuilt presbytery was recorded to have taken place in 1288, and the building was consecrated in 1301, although building work continued for several decades.[8] Roger Bigod, 5th Earl of Norfolk, the then lord of Chepstow, was a generous benefactor; his monumental undertaking was the rebuilding of the church.[9] The earl's coat of arms was included in the glasswork of the Abbey's east window in recognition of his contribution.

It is this great Decorated Gothic abbey church that can be seen today, representing the architectural developments of its period; it has a cruciform plan with an aisled nave, two chapels in each transept, and a square-ended aisled chancel. The abbey is built of Old Red Sandstone, with colours varying from purple to buff and grey. Its total length from east to west is 228 feet, while the transept is 150 feet in length.[10]

King Edward II stayed at Tintern for two nights in 1326. When the Black Death swept the country in 1349, it became impossible to attract new recruits for the lay brotherhood; during this period, the granges were more likely to be tenanted out than worked by lay brothers, evidence of Tintern's labour shortage. In the early 15th century, Tintern was short of money, due in part to the effects of the Welsh uprising under Owain Glyndŵr against the English kings, when abbey properties were destroyed by the Welsh. The closest battle to Tintern Abbey was at Craig-y-dorth near Monmouth, between Trellech and Mitchel Troy.

Dissolution and ruin

[edit]

In the reign of Henry VIII, the Dissolution of the Monasteries ended monastic life in England, Wales and Ireland. On 3 September 1536, Abbot Wych surrendered Tintern Abbey and all its estates to the King's visitors and ended a way of life that had lasted 400 years. Valuables from the Abbey were sent to the royal Treasury and Abbot Wych was pensioned off. The building was granted to the then lord of Chepstow, Henry Somerset, 2nd Earl of Worcester. Lead from the roof was sold and the decay of the buildings began.


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Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Abbey and the upper reaches of the Wye, a painting by William Havell, 1804

Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey is a poem by William Wordsworth. The title, Lines Written (or Composed) a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798, is often abbreviated simply to Tintern Abbey, although that building does not appear within the poem. It was written by Wordsworth after a walking tour with his sister in this section of the Welsh Borders. The description of his encounters with the countryside on the banks of the River Wye grows into an outline of his general philosophy. There has been considerable debate about why evidence of the human presence in the landscape has been downplayed and in what way the poem fits within the 18th-century loco-descriptive genre.

Background

The poem has its roots in Wordsworth's personal history. He had previously visited the area as a troubled twenty-three-year-old in August 1793. Since then he had matured and his seminal poetical relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge had begun. Wordsworth claimed to have composed the poem entirely in his head, beginning it upon leaving Tintern and not jotting down so much as a line until he reached Bristol, by which time it had just reached mental completion. Although the Lyrical Ballads upon which the two friends had been working was already in the process of publication, he was so pleased with what he had just written that he had it inserted at the eleventh hour as the concluding poem. Scholars generally agree that it is apt, for the poem represents the climax of Wordsworth's first great period of creative output and prefigures much of the distinctively Wordsworthian verse that was to follow.[1]

The poem is written in tightly structured decasyllabic blank verse and comprises verse paragraphs rather than stanzas. Categorising the poem is difficult, as it contains some elements of the ode and of the dramatic monologue. In the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth noted: "I have not ventured to call this Poem an Ode but it was written with a hope that in the transitions, and the impassioned music of the versification, would be found the principle requisites of that species of composition." The apostrophe at its beginning is reminiscent of the 18th century landscape-poem, but it is now agreed that the best designation of the work would be the conversation poem, which is an organic development of the loco-descriptive.[2] The silent listener in this case is Wordsworth's sister Dorothy, who is addressed in the poem's final section. Transcending the nature poetry written before that date, it employs a much more intellectual and philosophical engagement with the subject that verges on pantheism.[3]

Outline of themes

The poem's tripartite division encompasses a contextual scene-setting, a developing theorisation of the significance of his experience of the landscape, and a final confirmatory address to the implied listener.

Lines 1–49

Revisiting the natural beauty of the Wye after five years fills the poet with a sense of "tranquil restoration". He recognises in the landscape something which had been so internalised as to become the basis for out of the body experience.

Lines 49–111

In "thoughtless youth" the poet had rushed enthusiastically about the landscape and it is only now that he realises the power such scenery has continued to have upon him, even when not physically present there. He identifies in it "a sense sublime/ Of something far more deeply interfused,/ Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns" (lines 95–97) and the immanence of "A motion and a spirit, that impels/ All thinking things, all objects of all thought,/ And rolls through all things" (lines 100–103). With this insight he finds in nature "The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,/ The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul/ Of all my moral being" (lines 108–111).

Lines 111–159

The third movement of the poem is addressed to his sister Dorothy, "my dearest Friend,/ My dear, dear Friend," as a sharer in this vision and in the conviction that "all which we behold is full of blessings". It is this that will continue to create a lasting bond between them.

Literary and aesthetic context

Having internalised the landscape, Wordsworth claimed now "to see into the life of things" (line 50) and, so enabled, to hear "oftentimes/ The still sad music of humanity" (92–3), but recent critics have used close readings of the poem to question such assertions. For example, Marjorie Levinson views him "as managing to see into the life of things only 'by narrowing and skewing his field of vision' and by excluding 'certain conflictual sights and meanings'".[4] Part of her contention was that he had suppressed mention of the heavy industrial activity in the area, although it has since been argued that the "wreaths of smoke", playfully interpreted by Wordsworth as possible evidence "of some Hermit’s cave" upslope, in fact acknowledges the presence of the local ironworks, or of charcoal burning, or of a paper works.[5]

A print by Thomas Hearne of the "Iron Forge at Tintern" (1795)

Another contribution to the debate has been Crystal Lake's study of other poems written after a visit to Tintern Abbey, particularly those from about the same time as Wordsworth's. Noting not just the absence of direct engagement on his part with "the still sad music of humanity" in its present industrial manifestation, but also of its past evidence in the ruins of the abbey itself, she concludes that this "confirms Marjorie Levinson‘s well-known argument that the local politics of the Monmouthshire landscape require erasure if Wordsworth's poem is to advance its aesthetic agenda."[6]

The poems concerned include the following:

As the boat carrying Sneyd Davies neared Tintern Abbey, he noted the presence of "naked quarries" before passing to the ruins, bathed in evening light and blending into the natural surroundings to give a sense of "pleasurable sadness".[8] The poem by Davies more or less sets the emotional tone for the poems to come and brackets past and present human traces far more directly than does Wordsworth. His fellow clergyman Duncomb Davis, being from the area, goes into more detail. After a historical deviation, he returns to the present, where

… now no bell calls monks to morning prayer,
Daws only chant their early matins there,
Black forges smoke, and noisy hammers beat
Where sooty Cyclops puffing, drink and sweat,

following this with a description of the smelting process and a reflection that the present is more virtuous than the past. He anticipates Wordsworth by drawing a moral lesson from the scene, in his case noting the ivy-swathed ruin and exhorting,

Fix deep the bright exemplar in thy heart:
To friendship’s sacred call with joy attend,
Cling, like the ivy, round a falling friend.[9]

Similar reflections appear in the two contemporary sonnets. For Edmund Gardner, "Man’s but a temple of a shorter date",[10] while Luke Booker, embarking at sunset, hopes to sail as peacefully to the "eternal Ocean" at death.[11] The action of Wordsworth's poem therefore takes place in an already established moral landscape. Its retrospective mood draws on a particularly 18th century emotional sensibility also found in Edward Jerningham's description of the ruins, with their natural adornments of moss and 'flow'rets', and reflected in J. M. W. Turner's watercolour of them. Wordsworth's preference in his poem is for the broader picture rather than human detail, but otherwise it fits seamlessly within its contemporary literary and aesthetic context.

References

  1. ^ Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth, his doctrine and art in their historical relations, University of Wisconsin Studies #17, 1922, p. 64
  2. ^ J. Robert Barth, Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious, University of Missouri, 2003, p. 79
  3. ^ Geoffrey Durrant, p. 24.
  4. ^ James Castell, "Wordsworth and the 'Life of Things'" in The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, OUP 2015, p. 740
  5. ^ Dr Dewey Hall, Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical Study, Ashgate Publishing 2014, pp. 124–8
  6. ^ Crystal B. Lake, "The Life of Things at Tintern Abbey", Review of English Studies (2012) pp. 444–465
  7. ^ Poems and Plays, Vol.2, p. 135
  8. ^ Google Books
  9. ^ Quoted in Heath's guide to Tintern Abbey
  10. ^ The sonnet originally appeared pseudonymously, accompanying a similarly moralising sonnet on the Severn in The European Magazine vol.30, p. 119
  11. ^ Booker's sonnet appeared in Charles Heath's guide to Tintern Abbey

Bibliography

  • Durrant, Geoffrey. William Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969)

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William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey
by Dr Scott Masson   |    Feb 27, 2019
One of the great poems of the Romantic period on the relation of a person's memory to his identity.  In conjunction with the sublime, the poetic imagination is the vehicle to a 'new birth', a form of self-creation.

Quotes by authors on their experience when visiting Tintern Abbey

Poetical Tintern

“Descriptions of Tintern Abbey should be written on ivy leaves, and with a poet’s pen, for no other do justice to the air of solemn grandeur and religious melancholy reigning within its delicate cloisters”
— Catherine Sinclair, Hill and Valley, 1838

Tintern Abbey was as much a magnet for poets as for professional and amateur visual artists in the period. The most famous literary work associated with the site is William Wordsworth’s Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July,13, 1798. But it is interesting to note that there was large body of verse on the subject of the Abbey and topographical poems on the region well before the end of the eighteenth century. Syned Davies’ 1745 “A Voyage to Tintern Abbey, in Monmouthshire, from Whitminster in Gloucestershire” is the earliest represented here. The selection of authors and verses gathered here represents a small fraction of the surviving poetical descriptions, effusions and reflections inspired by the ruins. Those anthologized by Charles Heath in his Historical and Descriptive Account of the Ancient and Present State of Tintern Abbey, a guide sold locally at the Beaufort Arms, were carried into the Abbey itself, and perhaps read there.


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William Wordsworth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Wordsworth" redirects here. For other uses, see Wordsworth (disambiguation).
For the English composer, see William Wordsworth (composer). For the British academic and journalist in India, see William Christopher Wordsworth.
William Wordsworth
Anonymous portrait of Wordsworth, c. 1840–50
Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom
In office
6 April 1843 – 23 April 1850
MonarchVictoria
Preceded byRobert Southey
Succeeded byAlfred, Lord Tennyson
Personal details
Born7 April 1770
Cockermouth, Cumberland, England
Died23 April 1850 (aged 80)
Rydal, Westmorland, England
Spouse
Mary Hutchinson
 
​
(m. 1802)​
Children6, including Dora
Relatives
Alma materSt John's College, Cambridge
OccupationPoet
Signature

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).

Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was generally known as "The Poem to Coleridge".

Wordsworth was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850. He remains one of the most recognizable names in English poetry and was a key figure of the Romantic poets.

Early life

Family and education

Main article: Early life of William Wordsworth

The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in what is now named Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland (now in Cumbria),[1] part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. William's sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John Wordsworth, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was captain, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.[2]

Wordsworth's father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. He was frequently away from home on business, so the young William and his siblings had little involvement with him and remained distant until he died in 1783.[3] However, he did encourage William in his reading, and in particular, set him to commit large portions of verse to memory, including works by Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser which William would pore over in his father's library. William also spent time at his mother's parents' house in Penrith, Cumberland, where he was exposed to the moors but did not get along with his grandparents or uncle, who also lived there. His hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide.[4]

Wordsworth was taught to read by his mother, and he first attended a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth, then a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families. He was taught there by Ann Birkett, who instilled in her students traditions that included pursuing scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. At the school in Penrith, he met the Hutchinsons, including Mary Hutchinson, who later became his wife.[5]

After the death of Wordsworth's mother, in 1778, his father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire (now in Cumbria) and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She and William did not meet again for nine years.

Wordsworth debuted as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College, Cambridge. He received his BA degree in 1791.[6] He returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at Cambridge and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790, he went on a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.[7]

Relationship with Annette Vallon

In November 1791, Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France and became enchanted with the Republican movement. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who, in 1792, gave birth to their daughter Caroline. Financial problems and Britain's tense relations with France forced him to return to England alone the following year.[8] The circumstances of his return and subsequent behaviour raised doubts about his declared wish to marry Annette. However, he supported her and his daughter as best he could in later life. The Reign of Terror left Wordsworth thoroughly disillusioned with the French Revolution, and the outbreak of armed hostilities between Britain and France prevented him from seeing Annette and his daughter for some years.[citation needed]


With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy visited Annette and Caroline in Calais. The purpose of the visit was to prepare Annette for the fact of his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson.[8] Afterwards, he wrote the sonnet "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free", recalling a seaside walk with the nine-year-old Caroline, whom he had never seen before that visit. Mary was anxious that Wordsworth should do more for Caroline. Upon Caroline's marriage, in 1816, Wordsworth settled £30 a year on her (equivalent to £2,400 in 2021), payments which continued until 1835, when they were replaced by a capital settlement.[9][10]

Early career

First publication and Lyrical Ballads

We Are Seven

I met a little cottage girl:
   She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
   That clustered round her head.

She had a rustic, woodland air,
   And she was wildly clad;
Her eyes were fair, and very fair; -
   Her beauty made me glad.

“Sisters and brothers, little maid,
   How many may you be?”
“How many? Seven in all,” she said,
   And wondering looked at me.

“And where are they? I pray you tell.”
   She answered, “Seven are we;
And two of us at Conway dwell,
   And two are gone to sea;

“Two of us in the churchyard lie,
   My sister and my brother;
And, in the churchyard cottage, I
   Dwell near them with my mother.”

“My stockings there I often knit;
   My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
   And sing a song to them.

“And often after sunset, sir,
   When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
   And eat my supper there.

“How many are you, then,” said I,
   “If they two are in heaven?”
Quick was the little maid’s reply:
   “O Master! we are seven.”

“But they are dead; those two are dead!
   Their spirits are in heaven!” -
’T was throwing words away; for still
The little maid would have her will,
   And said, “Nay, we are seven!”

From the "We Are Seven" poem[11]
Wordsworth in 1798, about the time he began The Prelude.[12]

The year 1793 saw the first publication of poems by Wordsworth in the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. In 1795, he received a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert and was able to pursue a career as a poet.

It was also in 1795 that he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. For two years from 1795, William and his sister Dorothy lived at Racedown House in Dorset—a property of the Pinney family—to the west of Pilsdon Pen. They walked in the area for about two hours daily, and the nearby hills consoled Dorothy as she pined for the fells of her native Lakeland. She wrote,

"We have hills which, seen from a distance, almost take the character of mountains, some cultivated nearly to their summits, others in their wild state covered with furze and broom. These delight me the most as they remind me of our native wilds."[13]

In 1797, the pair moved to Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. Together Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement.[14] The volume gave neither Wordsworth's nor Coleridge's name as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in this collection, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as the author and included a preface to the poems.[15] It was augmented significantly in the next edition, published in 1802.[16] In this preface, which some scholars consider a central work of Romantic literary theory, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of verse, one that is based on the ordinary language "really used by men" while avoiding the poetic diction of much 18th-century verse. Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility", and calls his own poems in the book "experimental". A fourth and final edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805.[17]

The Borderers

Between 1795 and 1797, Wordsworth wrote his only play, The Borderers, a verse tragedy set during the reign of King Henry III of England, when Englishmen in the North Country came into conflict with Scottish border reivers. He attempted to get the play staged in November 1797. However, it was rejected by Thomas Harris, the manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, who proclaimed it "impossible that the play should succeed in the representation". The rebuff was not received lightly by Wordsworth, and the play was not published until 1842, after substantial revisions.[18]

Germany and move to the Lake District

I travelled among unknown men

I travelled among unknown men,
   In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
   What love I bore to thee.

'T is past, that melancholy dream!
   Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time, for still I seem
   To love thee more and more.

Among thy mountains did I feel
   The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished turned her wheel
   Beside an English fire.

Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed,
   The bowers where Lucy played;
And thine too is the last green field
   That Lucy's eyes surveyed.

Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge travelled to Germany in the autumn of 1798. While Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the journey, its main effect on Wordsworth was to produce homesickness.[8] During the harsh winter of 1798–99, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in Goslar, and, despite extreme stress and loneliness, began work on the autobiographical piece that was later titled The Prelude. He wrote several other famous poems in Goslar, including "The Lucy poems". In the Autumn of 1799, Wordsworth and his sister returned to England and visited the Hutchinson family at Sockburn. When Coleridge arrived back in England, he travelled to the North with their publisher, Joseph Cottle, to meet Wordsworth and undertake a proposed tour of the Lake District. This was the immediate cause of the brother and sister's settling at Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District, this time with another poet, Robert Southey, nearby. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey came to be known as the "Lake Poets".[20] Throughout this period, many of Wordsworth's poems revolved around themes of death, endurance, separation and grief.

Married life

Dove Cottage (Town End, Grasmere) – home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1799–1808; home of Thomas De Quincey, 1809–1820

In 1802, Lowther's heir, William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, paid the £4,000 (equivalent to £451,114 in 2023) owed to Wordsworth's father through Lowther's failure to pay his aide.[21] It was this repayment that afforded Wordsworth the financial means to marry. On 4 October, following his visit with Dorothy to France to arrange matters with Annette, Wordsworth married his childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson, at All Saints' Church, Brompton.[8] Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, three of whom predeceased her and William:

  • Rev. John Wordsworth MA (18 June 1803 – 25 July 1875). Vicar of Brigham, Cumberland and Rector of Plumbland, Cumberland. Buried at Highgate Cemetery (west side). Married four times:[22]
    1. Isabella Curwen (died 1848) had six children: Jane Stanley, Henry, William, John, Charles and Edward.
      1. Jane Stanley (1833–1912), who married the Rev. Bennet Sherard Kennedy (an illegitimate son of Robert Sherard, 6th Earl of Harborough) and their son Robert Harborough Sherard became first biographer to his friend, Oscar Wilde.[23]
    2. Helen Ross (died 1854). No children.
    3. Mary Ann Dolan (died after 1858) had one daughter Dora.
      1. Dora Wordsworth (1858–1934)[24]
    4. Mary Gamble. No children.
  • Dora Wordsworth (16 August 1804 – 9 July 1847). Married Edward Quillinan in 1841.
  • Thomas Wordsworth (15 June 1806 – 1 December 1812).
  • Catherine Wordsworth (6 September 1808 – 4 June 1812).
  • William "Willy" Wordsworth (12 May 1810 – 1883). He married Fanny Graham and had four children: Mary Louisa, William, Reginald, and Gordon.

Later career

Autobiographical work and Poems, in Two Volumes

Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call The Recluse.[25] In 1798–99 he started an autobiographical poem, which he referred to as the "poem to Coleridge" and which he planned would serve as an appendix to a larger work called The Recluse. In 1804, he began expanding this autobiographical work, having decided to make it a prologue rather than an appendix.[26] He completed this work, now generally referred to as the first version of The Prelude, in 1805, but refused to publish such a personal work until he had completed the whole of The Recluse. The death of his brother John, also in 1805, affected him strongly and may have influenced his decisions about these works.[27]

Rydal Mount – home to Wordsworth 1813–1850. Hundreds of visitors came here to see him over the years

Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances, as articulated in The Prelude and in such shorter works as "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" have been a source of critical debate. It was long supposed that Wordsworth relied chiefly on Coleridge for philosophical guidance. However, scholars have recently suggested that Wordsworth's ideas may have been formed years before he and Coleridge became friends in the mid-1790s. In particular, while he was in revolutionary Paris in 1792, the 22-year-old Wordsworth met the mysterious traveller John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822),[28] who was nearing the end of his thirty years of wandering, on foot, from Madras, India, through Persia and Arabia, across Africa and Europe, and up through the fledgling United States. By the time of their association, Stewart had published an ambitious work of original materialist philosophy entitled The Apocalypse of Nature (London, 1791), to which many of Wordsworth's philosophical sentiments may well be indebted.

In 1807, Wordsworth published Poems, in Two Volumes, including "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Until now, Wordsworth was known only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this new collection would cement his reputation. Its reception was lukewarm.

In 1810, Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction,[8] and in 1812, his son Thomas died at the age of 6, six months after the death of 3-year-old Catherine. The following year, he received an appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, and the stipend of £400 a year made him financially secure, albeit at the cost of political independence. In 1813, he and his family, including Dorothy, moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside (between Grasmere and Rydal Water), where he spent the rest of his life.[8]

The Prospectus

In 1814, Wordsworth published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part work The Recluse even though he never completed the first or third parts. He did, however, write a poetic Prospectus to The Recluse in which he laid out the structure and intention of the whole work. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature:

                      ... my voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:—and how exquisitely, too—
Theme this but little heard of among Men,
The external World is fitted to the Mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish ...[29]

Some modern critics[30] suggest that there was a decline in his work beginning around the mid-1810s, perhaps because most of the concerns that characterised his early poems (loss, death, endurance, separation and abandonment) had been resolved in his writings and his life.[31] By 1820, he was enjoying considerable success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works.

The poet and artist William Blake, who knew Wordsworth's work, was struck by Wordsworth's boldness in centring his poetry on the human mind. In response to Wordsworth's poetic program that, “when we look / Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man- / My haunt, and the main region of my song” (The Excursion), William Blake wrote to his friend Henry Crabb Robinson that the passage " caused him a bowel complaint which nearly killed him”.[32]

Following the death of his friend, the painter William Green in 1823, Wordsworth also mended his relations with Coleridge.[33] The two were fully reconciled by 1828 when they toured the Rhineland together.[8] Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 that rendered her an invalid for the remainder of her life. Coleridge and Charles Lamb both died in 1834, their loss being a difficult blow to Wordsworth. The following year saw the passing of James Hogg. Despite the death of many contemporaries, the popularity of his poetry ensured a steady stream of young friends and admirers to replace those he lost.

Religious and philosophical beliefs

[edit]

Wordsworth's youthful political radicalism, unlike Coleridge's, never led him to rebel against his religious upbringing. He remarked in 1812 that he was willing to shed his blood for the established Church of England, reflected in his Ecclesiastical Sketches of 1822. This religious conservatism also colours The Excursion (1814), a long poem that became extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It features three central characters: the Wanderer, the Solitary, who has experienced the hopes and miseries of the French Revolution, and the Pastor, who dominates the last third of the poem.[34]

Wordsworth's poetic philosophy

Behler[35] has pointed out the fact that Wordsworth wanted to invoke the basic feeling that a human heart possesses and expresses. He had reversed the philosophical standpoint expressed by his friend S. T. Coleridge, of 'creating the characters in such an environment so that the public feels them belonging to the distant place and time'. And this philosophical realisation by Wordsworth indeed allowed him to choose the language and structural patterning of the poetry that a common person used every day.[36] Kurland wrote that the conversational aspect of a language emerges through social necessity.[37] Social necessity posits the theme of possessing the proper knowledge, interest and biases also among the speakers. William Wordsworth has used conversation in his poetry to let the poet 'I' merge into 'We'. The poem "Farewell" exposes the identical emotion that the poet and his sister nourish:

"We leave you here in solitude to dwell/ With these our latest gifts of tender thought;

Thou, like the morning, in thy saffron coat,/ Bright gowan, and marsh-marigold, farewell!" (L.19–22).

This kind of conversational tone persists throughout the poet's poetic journey, which positions him as a man in society who speaks to the purpose of communion with the very common mass of that society.[38] Again; "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" [1] is the evidence where the poet expresses why he is writing and what he is writing and what purpose it will serve humanity.

Laureateship and other honours

Wordsworth remained a formidable presence in his later years. In 1837, the Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie reflected on her long acquaintance with Wordsworth. "He looks like a man that one must not speak to unless one has some sensible thing to say. However, he does occasionally converse cheerfully & well, and when one knows how benevolent & excellent he is, it disposes one to be very much pleased with him."[39]

In 1838, Wordsworth received an honorary doctorate in Civil Law from the University of Durham. The following year he was awarded the same honorary degree by the University of Oxford, when John Keble praised him as the "poet of humanity", praise greatly appreciated by Wordsworth.[8][40] (It has been argued that Wordsworth was a significant influence on Keble's immensely popular book of devotional poetry, The Christian Year (1827).[41]) In 1842, the government awarded him a Civil List pension of £300 a year.

Following the death of Robert Southey in 1843, Wordsworth became Poet Laureate. He initially refused the honour, saying that he was too old, but accepted when the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, assured him that "you shall have nothing required of you". Wordsworth thus became the only poet laureate to write no official verses. The sudden death of his daughter Dora in 1847 at age 42 was difficult for the ageing poet to take, and in his depression, he ultimately gave up writing new material.

Death

Gravestone of William Wordsworth, Grasmere, Cumbria

William Wordsworth died at home at Rydal Mount from an aggravated case of pleurisy on 23 April 1850,[42][43] and was buried at St Oswald's Church, Grasmere. His widow, Mary, published his lengthy autobiographical "Poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death.[44] Though it failed to interest people at the time, it has since come to be widely recognised as his masterpiece.[citation needed]

Musical settings

  • Dominick Argento set eight Wordsworth poems in his song cycle To be Sung Upon the Water (1973).[45]
  • Arnold Bax set the poem "To the Cuckoo" in 1900 while a student.[46]
  • Richard Rodney Bennett set Intimations of Immortality for a cappella chorus and one instrument in 2000.[47]
  • Benjamin Britten set a passage from The Prelude (beginning "But that night, When on my bed I lay") in his song cycle Nocturne (1958).
  • Alicia Van Buren (1860–1922) used the text of "Lines Written in Early Spring" for her song "In Early Spring".[48]
  • Ronald Corp has set passages from The Prelude within his cantata Laudamus (1994) and various poems in his song cycles The Music of Wordsworth and Flower of Cities.
  • George Dyson's Quo Vadis for chorus and orchestra, written between 1936 and 1945, includes a setting of "Our birth is but a sleep" (from Intimations of Immortality).[49]
  • Gerald Finzi set the ode Intimations of Immortality for tenor, chorus, and orchestra in 1950.[50]
  • Charles Ives set "I travelled among unknown men" in 1901. His work The Rainbow (1914) for chamber orchestra is described as "after the poem by William Wordsworth". He also set the text as a song.
  • Frederick Kelly set "The daffodils" in 1913.[51]
  • Elisabeth Lutyens set "I travelled among unknown men" in her Voice of Quiet Waters, op. 84 for mixec choir and ensemble (1973).[52]
  • Arthur Somervell set eight sections from "On the Power of Sound" as a cantata for chorus and orchestra in 1894.[53] His Meditation on Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality for baritone solo and chorus, was first premiered in 1907 but re-written in 1934.[54]
  • William Walton set "Remembrance of Collins" in his song cycle A Song for the Lord Mayor's Table in 1962.[55]

Margaret Louisa Woods portrayed the young Wordsworth in her novel A Poet's Youth (1923).

Ken Russell's 1978 film William and Dorothy portrays the relationship between William and his sister Dorothy.[56]

Wordsworth and Coleridge's friendship is examined by Julien Temple in his 2000 film Pandaemonium.[57]

Wordsworth has appeared as a character in works of fiction, including:

  • William Kinsolving – Mister Christian. 1996
  • Jasper Fforde – The Eyre Affair. 2001
  • Val McDermid – The Grave Tattoo. 2006
  • Sue Limb – The Wordsmiths at Gorsemere. 2008

Isaac Asimov's 1966 novelisation of the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage sees Dr. Peter Duval quoting Wordsworth's The Prelude as the miniaturised submarine sails through the cerebral fluid surrounding a human brain, comparing it to the "strange seas of thought".

Taylor Swift's 2020 album Folklore mentions Wordsworth in her bonus track "The Lakes", which is thought to be about the Lake District.[58]

Commemoration

In April 2020, the Royal Mail issued a series of postage stamps to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wordsworth. Ten 1st class stamps were issued featuring Wordsworth and all the major British Romantic poets, including William Blake, John Keats, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walter Scott. Each stamp included an extract from one of their most popular and enduring works, with Wordsworth's "The Rainbow" selected for the poet.[59]

Major works

Main article: List of poems by William Wordsworth

References

  1. ^ Historic England. "Wordsworth House (1327088)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 21 December 2009.
  2. ^ Allport, Denison Howard; Friskney, Norman J. (1986). "Appendix A (Past Governors)". A Short History of Wilson's School. Wilson's School Charitable Trust.
  3. ^ Moorman 1968 pp. 5–7.
  4. ^ Moorman 1968:9–13.
  5. ^ Moorman 1968:15–18.
  6. ^ "Wordsworth, William (WRDT787W)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  7. ^ Andrew Bennett (12 February 2015). William Wordsworth in Context. Cambridge University Press. p. 191. ISBN 978-1-107-02841-8.
  8. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h Everett, Glenn, "William Wordsworth: Biography" at The Victorian Web, accessed 7 January 2007.
  9. ^ Gill (1989) Pp. 208, 299
  10. ^ "Purchasing Power of British Pounds from 1245 to Present". MeasuringWorth.com. Retrieved 28 May 2012.
  11. ^ A Library of Poetry and Song: Being Choice Selections from The Best Poets. With An Introduction by William Cullen Bryant, New York, J.B. Ford and Company, 1871, pp. 14-15.
  12. ^ "The Cornell Wordsworth Collection". Cornell University. Retrieved 13 February 2009.
  13. ^ Roland Gant (1980). Dorset Villages. Robert Hale Ltd. pp. 111–112. ISBN 0-7091-8135-3.
  14. ^ Lyricall Ballads: With a Few Other Poems (1 ed.). London: J. & A. Arch. 1798. Retrieved 13 November 2014. via archive.org
  15. ^ Wordsworth, William (1800). Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems. Vol. I (2 ed.). London: Printed for T.N. Longman and O. Rees. Retrieved 13 November 2014.; Wordsworth, William (1800). Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems. Vol. II (2 ed.). London: Printed for T.N. Longman and O. Rees. Retrieved 13 November 2014. via archive.org
  16. ^ Wordsworth, William (1802). Lyrical Ballads with Pastoral and other Poems. Vol. I (3 ed.). London: Printed for T.N. Longman and O. Rees. Retrieved 13 November 2014. via archive.org.
  17. ^ Wordsworth, William (1805). Lyrical Ballads with Pastoral and other Poems. Vol. I (4 ed.). London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, by R. Taylor. Retrieved 13 November 2014. via archive.org.
  18. ^ Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 132–133.
  19. ^ A Library of Poetry and Song: Being Choice Selections from The Best Poets. With An Introduction by William Cullen Bryant, New York, J.B. Ford and Company, 1871, p. 442.
  20. ^ Recollections of the Lake Poets.
  21. ^ Moorman 1968 p. 8
  22. ^ Ward, John Powell (1 March 2005). "Wordsworth's Eldest Son: John Wordsworth and the Intimations Ode". The Wordsworth Circle. 36 (2): 66–80. doi:10.1086/TWC24045111. S2CID 159651742. Retrieved 14 September 2021.
  23. ^ Hanberry, Gerard (29 September 2011). More Lives Than One. Gill & Macmillan Ltd. p. 29. ISBN 978-1-84889-943-8. Retrieved 14 September 2021.
  24. ^ "Wordsworth mss. II, 1848–1909". archives.iu.edu. Archives Online at Indiana University. Retrieved 14 September 2021.
  25. ^ "William Wordsworth | The Asian Age Online, Bangladesh". The Asian Age. Retrieved 23 June 2022.
  26. ^ "William Wordsworth – English History". 18 November 2021. Retrieved 23 June 2022.
  27. ^ O&#39, John; Meara (1 January 2011). "This Life, This Death: Wordsworth's Poetic Destiny". IUniverse, Bloomington IN.
  28. ^ Kelly Grovier, "Dream Walker: A Wordsworth Mystery Solved", Times Literary Supplement, 16 February 2007
  29. ^ Poetical Works. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford U.P. 1936. p. 590.
  30. ^ Hartman, Geoffrey (1987). Wordsworth's Poetry, 1787–1814. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. 329–331. ISBN 9780674958210.
  31. ^ Already in 1891 James Kenneth Stephen wrote satirically of Wordsworth having "two voices": one is "of the deep", the other "of an old half-witted sheep/Which bleats articulate monotony".
  32. ^ Abrams, M.H. (1971). Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. Norton. p. 24.
  33. ^ Sylvanus Urban, The Gentleman's Magazine, 1823
  34. ^ "Wordsworth's Religion". www.victorianweb.org.
  35. ^ BEHLER, ERNST (1968). "The Origins of the Romantic Literary Theory". Colloquia Germanica. 2: 109–126. ISSN 0010-1338. JSTOR 23979800.
  36. ^ Doolittle, James (1 December 1969). "The Demonic Imagination: Style and Theme in French Romantic Poetry". Modern Language Quarterly. 30 (4): 615–617. doi:10.1215/00267929-30-4-615. ISSN 0026-7929.
  37. ^ "Dan Kurland's www.criticalreading.com -- Strategies for Critical Reading and Writing". www.criticalreading.com. Retrieved 23 June 2022.
  38. ^ Ahmed, Sheikh Saifullah (1 January 2020). "The Sociolinguistic Perspectives of the Stylistic Liberation of Wordsworth". Sparkling International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research Studies.
  39. ^ Baillie, Joanna (2010). Thomas McLean (ed.). Further Letters of Joanna Baillie. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. p. 181. ISBN 978-0-8386-4149-1.
  40. ^ Gill, pp396-7
  41. ^ "The Religious Influence of the Romantic Poets".
  42. ^ "Poet Laureate", The British Monarchy official website.
  43. ^ Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 422–3.
  44. ^ e g Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal 26 December 1801
  45. ^ To be Sung Upon the Water, Lieder.net
  46. ^ "Too the Cuckoo", Lieder.net
  47. ^ The Glory and the Dream, Novello (2000)
  48. ^ "Collection: Papers of Alicia Keisker Van Buren, 1889–1915 | HOLLIS for". hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu. Retrieved 18 April 2021.
  49. ^ 'Dyson, Quo Vadis' in Gramophone, June 2003
  50. ^ "Intimations of Immortality, Op. 29". Hyperion Records.
  51. ^ '6 Songs, Op.6 (Kelly, Frederick Septimus)', score at IMSLP
  52. ^ Voice of Quiet Waters, Op.84, University of York Music Press
  53. ^ 'Highbury Philharmonic Society', in The Musical Times, Vol. 39 (1898), p. 100
  54. ^ 'Ode on the Intimations of Immortality (Somervell, Arthur)', score at IMSLP
  55. ^ Richard Stokes. The Penguin Book of English Song (2016) pp. 298-312
  56. ^ "William and Dorothy (1978)". BFI. Archived from the original on 4 January 2018. Retrieved 4 August 2021.
  57. ^ Van Gelder, Lawrence (13 July 2001). "FILM IN REVIEW; 'Pandaemonium'". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 4 August 2021.
  58. ^ "Taylor Swift dedicates Folklore song to the Lake District". BBC. 12 August 2020.
  59. ^ "New stamps issued on 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth's birth". ITV. Retrieved 1 October 2022.
  60. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e M. H. Abrams, editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period, writes of these five poems: "This and the four following pieces are often grouped by editors as the 'Lucy poems,' even though 'A slumber did my spirit seal' does not identify the 'she' who is the subject of that poem. All but the last were written in 1799, while Wordsworth and his sister were homesick in Germany. There has been diligent speculation about Lucy's identity, but it remains speculative. The one certainty is that she is not the girl of Wordsworth's 'Lucy Gray'" (Abrams 2000).
  61. ^ Wordsworth, William (4 January 1810). "French Revolution". The Friend. No. 20. Retrieved 8 June 2018.

Further reading


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