Wordsworth Context

Life Summary

• Born in Cockermouth in Cumbria (Lake District)

• Grew up developing love for nature

• While studying at Cambridge, went on a walking tour in Switzerland and France, and became enthused by the ideas of the French Rev

• Settled at Dove Cottage eventually

• Eventually his political views underwent a transformation as he became increasingly conservative, disillusioned by the events in France culminating with Napoleon taking power

Plato and Reincarnation

• Romantics believed the mind and soul didn’t come into the world empty - Plato (who was very popular to Romantics) believed in reincarnation

  • He claimed that a person’s immortal soul gains knowledge whilst in heaven before their birth; this knowledge is recalled when prompted by certain ideas

• Wordsworth viewed the demands of society as the cause of our soul forgetting its experience of heaven before birth

Preface to ‘Lyrical Ballads’ 1800

• “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

• “Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man”

• “the poet is chiefly distinct from other men by a great promptness to think and feel without immediate external excitement, and a greater power in expressing such thoughts and feelings” (Same in all other ways)

Preface to ‘Lyrical Ballads’ 1802

• The principle object of these poems was to present “incidents and situations from common life” through “a certain colouring of imagination”

• “to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them… the primary laws of nature”

• “the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain that maturity” in low and rustic life

• “the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings”

• “the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature”

• Rural life frees you from hierarchy, “less under the influence of social vanity”

Religion

• Religious upbringing, was taught the bible at a secondary school for upper-class children

• Unlike Coleridge, much like Blake, his religious conservatism never interfered with his radical political views

French Rev

• Visited in 1791 - was enthusiastic about the liberal movement that erupted in 1789, became a strong supporter of the Republican movement

• Had a daughter with a French woman (Annette Vallon) in 1792
  Was forced to leave due to the tense relations between Britain and France in 1792/3

• Became utterly disillusioned with the Revolution as a result of the Reign of Terror

• 1802 Peace of Amiens allowed travel to France again, he informed Vallon of his marriage

• During the time of Napoleon's power (1799-1815), he was more conservative

Lyrical Ballads

• Ballads were originally a medieval oral tradition - told stories of love, war and travel

• Wordsworth + other Romantics attracted to them because they represented everything which was antipathetic to Augustan Enlightenment

• Lyrical means imbued with emotion - Wordsworth attached to the genre an examination of his own and his characters’ feelings

• Lyrical Ballads also showed a departure from tradition in genre, by making children, women and ordinary countrymen their subjects rather than heroes

The Sublime

• Wordsworth wrote sublime lines of poetry about the moods of nature and man

• “he and Leats agreed that [Newton] had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colours”

Contemporary Criticism

• Though Southey criticised many poems in ‘Lyrical Ballads’, he commended the beauty of ‘Tintern Abbey’

• Wordsworth was exhorted to write on more “elevated subjects and in a more cheerful disposition”

Lines Written in Early Spring

• 1798

• Dismayed by the materialism of his contemporary England and appalled by the horrors of the French Rev, Wordsworth often brooded on the contrast between the world of external Nature and the man-made world of moral and religious decay. political opportunism, labouring-class exploitation and civil strife

Tintern Abbey

• Added last minute to ‘Lyrical Ballads’

• Wrote “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 versification, would be found the principle requisites of that species of composition”

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

• First published as just' ‘Ode’ as a four stanza poem

• Wordsworth added remaining stanzas and republished poem