William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
- Musleh Saadi
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William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumbria, England, on April 7, 1770. Wordsworth’s mother died when he was eight—this experience shapes much of his later work. Wordsworth attended Hawkshead Grammar School, where his love of poetry was firmly established and, it is believed, where he made his first attempts at verse. While he was at Hawkshead, Wordsworth’s father died leaving him and his four siblings orphans. After Hawkshead, Wordsworth studied at St. John’s College in Cambridge and, before his final semester, he set out on a walking tour of Europe an experience that influenced both his poetry and his political sensibilities. While touring Europe, Wordsworth came into contact with the French Revolution. This experience, as well as a subsequent period living in France, brought about Wordsworth’s interest and sympathy for the life, troubles, and speech of the “common man.” These issues proved to be of the utmost importance to Wordsworth’s work. Wordsworth’s earliest poetry was published in 1793 in the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. While living in France, Wordsworth conceived a daughter, Caroline, out of wedlock; he left France, however, before she was born. In 1802, he returned to France with his sister on a four-week visit to meet Caroline. Later that year, he married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, and they had five children together. In 1812, while living in Grasmere, two of their children, Catherine and John, died.
Equally important in the poetic life of Wordsworth was his 1795 meeting with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was with Coleridge that Wordsworth published the famous Lyrical Ballads (J. & A. Arch) in 1798. While the poems themselves are some of the most influential in Western literature, it is the preface to the second edition that remains one of the most important testaments to a poet’s views on both his craft and his place in the world. In the preface Wordsworth writes on the need for “common speech” within poems and argues against the hierarchy of the period which valued epic poetry above the lyric.
Wordsworth’s most famous work, The Prelude (Edward Moxon, 1850), is considered by many to be the crowning achievement of English Romanticism. The poem, revised numerous times, chronicles the spiritual life of the poet and marks the birth of a new genre of poetry. Although Wordsworth worked on The Prelude throughout his life, the poem was published posthumously. Wordsworth spent his final years settled at Rydal Mount in England, traveling, and continuing his outdoor excursions. Devastated by the death of his daughter, Dora, in 1847, Wordsworth seemingly lost his will to compose poems.
William Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount on April 23, 1850, leaving his wife, Mary, to publish The Prelude three months later.
William Wordsworth as a Poet of Nature:
As a poet of Nature, Wordsworth stands supreme. He is a worshipper of Nature, Nature’s devotee or high-priest. His love of Nature was probably truer, and more tender, than that of any other English poet, before or since. Nature comes to occupy in his poem a separate or independent status and is not treated in a casual or passing manner as by poets before him. Wordsworth had a full-fledged philosophy, a new and original view of Nature. Three points in his creed of Nature may be noted:
(a) He conceived of Nature as a living Personality. He believed that there is a divine spirit pervading all the objects of Nature. This belief in a divine spirit pervading all the objects of Nature may be termed as mystical Pantheism and is fully expressed in Tintern Abbey and in several passages in Book II of The Prelude.
(b) Wordsworth believed that the company of Nature gives joy to the human heart and he looked upon Nature as exercising a healing influence on sorrow-stricken hearts.
(c) Above all, Wordsworth emphasized the moral influence of Nature. He spiritualised Nature and regarded her as a great moral teacher, as the best mother, guardian and nurse of man, and as an elevating influence. He believed that between man and Nature there is mutual consciousness, spiritual communion or ‘mystic intercourse’. He initiates his readers into the secret of the soul’s communion with Nature. According to him, human beings who grow up in the lap of Nature are perfect in every respect.
Wordsworth believed that we can learn more of man and of moral evil and good from Nature than from all the philosophies. In his eyes, “Nature is a teacher whose wisdom we can learn, and without which any human life is vain and incomplete.” He believed in the education of man by Nature. In this he was somewhat influenced by Rousseau. This inter-relation of Nature and man is very important in considering Wordsworth’s view of both.
Cazamian says that “To Wordsworth, Nature appears as a formative influence superior to any other, the educator of senses and mind alike, the sower in our hearts of the deep-laden seeds of our feelings and beliefs. It speaks to the child in the fleeting emotions of early years, and stirs the young poet to an ecstasy, the glow of which illuminates all his work and dies of his life.”.
Development of His Love for Nature
Wordsworth’s childhood had been spent in Nature’s lap. A nurse both stern and kindly, she had planted seeds of sympathy and under-standing in that growing mind. Natural scenes like the grassy Derwent river bank or the monster shape of the night-shrouded mountain played a “needful part” in the development of his mind. In The Prelude, he records dozens of these natural scenes, not for themselves but for what his mind could learn through.
Nature was “both law and impulse”; and in earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Wordsworth was conscious of a spirit which kindled and restrained. In a variety of exciting ways, which he did not understand, Nature intruded upon his escapades and pastimes, even when he was indoors, speaking “memorable things”. He had not sought her; neither was he intellectually aware of her presence. She riveted his attention by stirring up sensations of fear or joy which were “organic”, affecting him bodily as well as emotionally. With time the sensations were fixed indelibly in his memory. All the instances in Book I of The Prelude show a kind of primitive animism at work”; the emotions and psychological disturbances affect external scenes in such a way that Nature seems to nurture “by beauty and by fear”.
In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth traces the development of his love for Nature. In his boyhood Nature was simply a playground for him. At the second stage he began to love and seek Nature but he was attracted purely by its sensuous or aesthetic appeal. Finally his love for Nature acquired a spiritual and intellectual character, and he realized Nature’s role as a teacher.
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) occupies a central position in English literary history as a founding figure of the Romantic movement and as a poet whose influence extends into Victorian moral thought. Emerging in reaction to the artificiality and rationalism of eighteenth-century Neoclassicism, Wordsworth’s poetry articulates a new vision grounded in emotion, nature, and individual consciousness. His collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads (1798) marked a decisive shift in poetic theory and practice, foregrounding ordinary experience and natural language as legitimate poetic subjects William Wordsworth . Although chronologically a Romantic poet, Wordsworth’s later emphasis on moral discipline, spiritual reflection, and ethical instruction anticipates concerns that would become central to Victorian poetry Romantic and Victorian poetry.
Among the recurring themes in Wordsworth’s poetry, Nature stands as the most defining and philosophically charged. Unlike earlier poets who treated nature as a decorative background, Wordsworth conceives it as a living, educative presence endowed with spiritual and moral authority. Poems such as “Tintern Abbey” and The Prelude present nature as a formative power that shapes both emotion and intellect, fostering what he terms “a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused.” This vision reflects Romantic pantheism the belief in a divine spirit immanent in the natural world, and reveals Wordsworth’s personality as contemplative, reverent, and metaphysically inclined. Nature, for Wordsworth, is not merely loved; it is trusted as a guide superior to institutional philosophy or social convention, a conviction strongly emphasized in Romantic literary theory Romantic and Victorian poetry.
Closely allied to his treatment of nature is Wordsworth’s emphasis on emotion and individual experience, which he elevates as primary sources of poetic truth. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, he famously defines poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings… recollected in tranquillity,” a formulation that reveals a personality deeply introspective and psychologically attuned. His speakers often revisit childhood memories, solitary wanderings, and moments of intense feeling, suggesting a belief that emotional authenticity is the foundation of moral and imaginative life. This inward focus reflects a Romantic valorization of the self, yet it also foreshadows Victorian introspection, where personal experience becomes a site of ethical reflection rather than mere self-expression William Wordsworth .
Wordsworth’s poetic techniques further illuminate his worldview and temperament. He consistently favors simple diction, blank verse, and imagery drawn from rural life, rejecting ornate rhetoric in favor of clarity and sincerity. His use of symbolism—such as rivers, mountains, light, and childhood figures—allows natural objects to carry psychological and moral significance. Personification frequently animates nature, reinforcing his belief in a “mystic intercourse” between the human mind and the external world. Meter, particularly unrhymed iambic pentameter, supports a meditative, conversational tone suited to philosophical reflection. These formal choices underscore Wordsworth’s personality as disciplined yet emotionally responsive, committed to truthfulness over aesthetic display, and deeply invested in poetry as a moral instrument Romantic and Victorian poetry,
Taken collectively, Wordsworth’s themes and techniques reveal a poet whose personality is marked by moral seriousness, spiritual sensitivity, and faith in natural education.
He consistently presents nature as a nurturing force “the best mother, guardian, and nurse of man” capable of forming character more effectively than social institutions. This belief aligns him with Rousseau’s educational philosophy while distinguishing him from later Victorians who increasingly emphasized social structures and religious doubt. Wordsworth’s worldview remains fundamentally optimistic: he believes that sustained communion with nature cultivates emotional balance, ethical clarity, and spiritual wholeness, a conviction that defines both his poetry and his poetic self.
In sum, William Wordsworth’s poetry reveals a personality shaped by reverence for nature, trust in emotion, and commitment to moral growth. Through recurring themes of natural communion, individual consciousness, and spiritual education—expressed via simple diction, symbolic imagery, and meditative blank verse Wordsworth articulates a distinctly Romantic worldview that nonetheless anticipates Victorian ethical concerns. His poetic identity emerges as that of a visionary moralist who believed that nature is the supreme teacher of both the heart and the mind, and that without such guidance, human life remains incomplete.
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