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Introduction HANDOUT

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19 views2 pages

Introduction HANDOUT

Uploaded by

Zsófia Pazdora
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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BBN-ANG-218/W

The Poetry of William Wordsworth


Zsolt Komáromy, assoc. prof.

Introduction: Perspectives on Wordsworth, then and now


HANDOUT

William Wordsworth: 1770-1850

1. Literary / historical contexts


- in W’s childhood the English “classics” were authors (e.g. Addison or Pope or Johnson
or Goldsmith) whose work was definitive of 18th century literature
- the contemporary writers in W’s youth mainly practiced the “literature of sensibility”
(William Cowper, Charlotte Smith or Robert Burns)
- the French Revolution a formative experience
- the Romantic Movement
- the Victorian period
 a poet still closely tied to the older world of classicist culture, but also an initiator of
the great divide from it in laying the foundations for modern poetry

2. Biographical background
- Cockermouth, Penrith (Cumbria, Lake District)
- orphaned at the age of thirteen
- Hawkshead Grammar School in (1779), St John’s College, Cambridge (1787-91)
- walking tour to France and Switzerland (Descriptive Sketches)
- stay in revolutionary France, love affair and illegitimate child with Anette Vallon;
return to England, but stuck there because in 1793 England and France go to war
- hazy period of wanderings in England and Wales (secret return to France?)
- comes in possession of a small inheritance in 1795
- moves in radical circles in London and Bristol; acquaintance with Coleridge; settles in
Racedown, the south of England
- 1797: cooperation with Coleridge intensifies, W moves to Alfoxden and becomes
neighbors with Coleridge; a circle of family and friends is formed
- 1798: Lyrical Ballads published; trip to Germany
- Returns to England in 1799 and takes up residence in the Lake District
- 1802: marries Mary Hutcheson
- 1813: gets a job as Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland, moves to Rydal Mount,
where he is to spend the rest of his life (apart from occasional tours to the Continent and
Scotland, and visits to London)
- 1843: appointed Poet Laureate

Reception
- An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches: did not attract any mentionable critical
attention; Coleridge: “seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius
above the literary horizon more evidently announced.”
- Lyrical Ballads:
a) retrospective myth of radical novelty (“A shout of derision rose from all the critics; and
England in general can scarcely be said to have been less than personally offended by this
serious and almost solemn attempt to impose a new poetical creed upon her.” (Margaret
Oliphant, The Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the
Nineteenth Century, 1882)
b) attacks by Francis Jeffrey on the “Lake Poets” as a group
c) W. acquires some reputation and a coterie audience
- Poems, in Two Volumes, 1807: hostile criticism; W often parodied and ridiculed
(“Preface” to Lyrical Ballads 1800: “the real language of man,” subjects from “low and
rustic life” – seen as an attack on the privileged arbiters of taste, on the learned cultural
elite that exercised power over standards of taste; “the feeling … developed [in the
poems] gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to
the feeling” – seen as resulting in a tendency to write on most simple, even trivial
subjects; W’s heterodox philosophic poems of a quasi-pantheistic nature – seen as hazy,
unintelligible metaphysics)
- The Excursion, 1814: badly received (Jeffrey: “This will never do.”)
- all following volumes selling very badly
- change in the 1830s: Victorian audience increasingly values W’s later poetry; what
were earlier seen as faults are now seen as virtues; W becomes a celebrated poet, a
Victorian sage, a cultural icon
(Coleridge / W.: “every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must
create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be
seen.”)
- 20th century: W. comes to be seen as the defining Romantic poet - a general consensus that
what he wrote roughly after 1807 is of no serious interest.
- later 20th century / today: rediscovery of a vast amount of MS material, reconstructions
of the W-canon, tracing of new lines of intellectual and poetic development through the
study of unpublished material
- W today has a place in the pantheon of English poetry beside Shakespeare and Milton

Published poetical works:

1793: An Evening Walk


1793: Descriptive Sketches
1798: Lyrical Ballads
1800: Lyrical Ballads expanded to two volumes; reissued in 1802, 1805
1807: Poems, in Two Volumes
1814: The Excursion
1815: Poetical Works (collected poems in two volumes)
1815: The White Doe of Rylestone (wr. 1807)
1819: Peter Bell (wr. 1798)
1819: The Waggoner (wr. 1806)
1820: The River Duddon
1820: Poetical Works (a single volume meant as a supplementing third volume to the 1815
collected poems, collecting work published since then)
1820: Miscellaneous Poems (four volumes: the 1815 (2vols) and 1820 (1vol) collections, plus
one new volume of other poems)
1822: Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820
1822: Ecclesiastical Sonnets
1827: Poetical Works (five volumes, including The Excursion)
1832: Poetical Works (four volumes – last publication with Longman)
1835: Yarrow Revisited
1836: Poetical Works (now published by Moxon – reissued in 1839 and 1840)
1838: Collected Sonnets
1842: Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years
1843, 1845, 1849: reissues of Poetical Works including the new poems
1851: Poetical Works (posthumous collection including The Prelude)

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