24/10/07 - English Literature - William Wordsworth

This lecture will discuss Wordsworth particularly in relation to his politics and uneasy relationship with democracy.

Chronology
1770 Born April 7 to John and Anne (Cookson) Wordsworth, second of five.
1778 Mother dies; William goes to Hawkshead Grammar School.
1783 Father dies.
1787 Goes up to St. John's College, Cambridge.
1789 An Evening Walk.
1790 Walking tour of France, Switzerland, and Germany.
1791 Graduates; goes to France; meets and has an affair with Annette Vallon.
1792 (Illegitimate) daughter Caroline born.
1793 Returns to England to earn money; Anglo-French War prevents his return to France until 1802. Descriptive Sketches.
1794 Reunited with Dorothy.
1795 Inherits legacy of £900. Meets Coleridge.
1797 William and his sister Dorothy move to Alfoxden to be near Coleridge.
1798 Lyrical Ballads.
1798-99 The Wordsworths travel to Germany with Coleridge.
1799 William and Dorothy settle in the Lake district, at Dove Cottage, Grasmere.
1800 Lyrical Ballads revised, Preface added.
1802 Visits the Vallons at Calais. After receiving a much-delayed inheritance, marries Mary Hutchinson. Sonnets Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty.
1803 Son John born. (Four more children by 1810.)
1805 The Prelude finished. Brother John lost at sea.
1807 Poems in Two Volumes.
1809 The Convention of Cintra.
1810 Quarrel with Coleridge.
1812 Children Thomas and Caroline die.
1813 Moves to Rydal Mount, between Grasmere and Rydal Water; appointed Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland (£400/year).
1814 The Excursion.
1815 Preface to Lyrical Ballads revised.
1819 Peter Bell and The Waggoner.
1820 We Are Seven and The River Duddon (sonnets).
1825 Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems.
1828 Tours the Rhineland with Coleridge.
1839 Oxford confers honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree.
1842 Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years. 1843 named Poet Laureate.
1847 Daughter Dora dies.
1850 Dies (April 23). The Prelude.

The first edition of Lyrical Ballads was financed largely by Wordsworth himself, and published by a relatively unknown company. The edition contained an opening advertisement, forty-two poems by Wordsworth, four by Coleridge, begins with "The Ancient Mariner" and ends with "Tintern Abbey." The term "Lyrical ballads" suggests subjectivity, formality politeness, artificiality and the scribal, juxtaposed with the communal, informal, vernacular, spontaneous and oral. Ballads were an older form of poetry while lyrics were more modern. So the title itself suggests the irresolvable nature of the poems it contains.

"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 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 endeavour 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: and, on the other band, 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 only, that I have pleased a greater number, than I ventured to hope I should please."
[Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802]

Wordsworth makes audacious statements, and has a preoccupation with the vernacular and lower classes.

"What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than any thing which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves; whence, and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement."
[Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802]

This is an unmediated form of public discourse.

Wordsworth's definitions of poetry are as bipartite, spontaneous and of a reserved crafting together. He intended for his Lyrical Ballads to show dynamism and fixity. He was not popular in his time: the people he wrote about could not afford to buy his publications, for he is obsessed with the rural poor. He knew he was speaking mainly to a male privileged society sharing the same point of view about the poor that he wrote about.

Blake published Songs of Innocence in 1789, and he produced it himself. The Songs are about the radical innocence of children and their spiritual purity. He relates back of Rousseau's Emile of 1762. Wordsworth takes the idea of 'radical innocence' for his own poems, such as "We Are Seven". In it he demonstrates the child's innocent vision and so points out that the adult's logical mind is at fault.

In his "Intimations Ode" Wordsworth asks us to turn to greater things, "paulo maiora canamus." He turns to a higher, more formal canon of poetry.

"And oh ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Think not of any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
["Intimations Ode"]

Notice how Wordsworth uses puns which lend themselves to oppositional reading. Is the poem really about loss? We see the ambiguity of his words, making the meaning uncertain and giving a more pessimistic feel than the optimistic surface reading.

Wordsworth's consciousness has moved away from radical thought to experience. His idea of the loss of innocence relates to Plato's allegory of the cave. Wordsworth says we are like Plato's prisoners watching shadows. If we go outside we realise in the light of day that we are living a deluded existence. We can read Wordsworth on a Freudian level. He always refers to nature as a female entity, suggesting infantilism and a desire to return to infancy. He employs textual repression.

Wordsworth was essentially a poet of the Industrial revolution. The image of dark satanic mills underlies his work. He wrote for the middle classes so he is not "man speaking to man," i.e. frank and straightforward, but bourgeois and polite. He set himself up as a radical, then became a part of the establishment. However, was he not a part of the establishment from the beginning? Wordsworth was an uneasy political tourist, and often got things wrong.