William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

    Life :

Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth, Cumberland, and spent his seventeen years in Cumberland Hills; his mother died when he was eight years old and after six years his father has also died, and the orphan has taken in charge by relatives, in school he used learn with flowers and hills rather than classes; in 1787 he went to Cambridge. It was the time of stress and storm with his revolutionary experience in university and in his life it was like a period of uncertainty. He started writing from 1797 to 1799 a very short period but very important in his life and for the romantic period, and from 1799 he has taken retirement from his work of writing and spent time in between the nature at northern lake region where he was born, he was very close to the nature which experience has reflected in all his poetry.

I heard among the solitary hills

Low breathings coming after me, and sounds

Of undistinguishable motion.

He goes out into the woods at night and what he experienced he has presented in the poetry it is like a mental photograph. On the death of Southey, he was made poet laureate, against his own inclination.

     The Poetry of Wordsworth :

Wordsworth has in favour of simple poetic diction but he himself has not followed his own rule, his poetries are easy to read but not to understand, reader could get the pleasure but not the hidden meaning. As in his poem “Lucy”:

A violet by a mossy stone,

Half hidden from the eye;

Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

Wordsworth was strongly believed that man and nature should be portrayed as they are. He is not always melodious, but he is seldom graceful. He is absolutely without humour.

After his longer works his first good book as per critics was Selections with short poems, after reading these poems we come to know that Wordsworth is the greatest nature poet that ever has been produced by our literature. No other poet has found such beauty in nature as Wordsworth has described. He had a strong belief that all nature is the reflection of the living God, all his contemporary writers like Cowper, Burns, Keats, and Tennyson were providing the out ward aspects of nature in varying degrees but Wordsworth gives you her very life, and the experience of man with the nature. While reading his poetry the reader could feel the touch of nature, the experience of wonderland and memory of our own childhood.

Wordsworth’s philosophy toward human life is very simple that man is not apart from nature, but is the very “life of her life.” Wordsworth has connected birth with nature and he expressed this gladness with poetry that the child comes straight from the Creator of nature:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

But trailing cloud of glory do we come

From God, who is our home”

In “Intimations of Immorality from recollections of Early Childhood” and in “The Retreat” he has summed up his childhood and philosophy; In “Tintern Abbey”, “The Rainbow”, “Ode to Duty” and “Intimation of Immorality” it is plain teaching; In “Michael,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “to a Highland Girl,” “Stepping Westward,” he tries to suggests the joy and sorrow not of princes or kings but of a common life. He has described his whole life in “The Prelude” and “The Recluse” is the treat to nature.  

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