Q.

A
CRITICAL NOTES

William Wordsworth
(A Poet of Nature as a Pantheism and Reactionary)

Historical Context and Social Condition

Literary Trends
The Return to Nature
His Life and works
His Theory of Poetry
His Features of Poetry

Q.A. SHAH
 Contexts and Conditions

The dates of the Romantic period of literature are not precise and the term ‘romantic’
was it not widely used until after the period in question. Conventionally, the period
begins in 1798, which saw the publication by Wordsworth and Coleridge of their Lyrical
Ballads, and ends in1832 a year which saw the death of Sir Walter Scott and the
enactment by Parliament of the First Reform Bill. These years link literary and political
events. The Romantic period was an era in which a literary revolution took place
alongside social and economic revolutions. In some histories of literature his Romantic
period is called the ‘Age of Revolutions’.

The period was one of rapid change as the nation was transformed from an agricultural
country to an industrial one. The laws of a free market developed by the economist
Adam Smith in his book Wealth of Nations (1776), dominated people’s lives. At the
same time a shift in the balance of power took place. Power and wealth were gradually
transferred from the landholding aristocracy to the large-scale employers of modern
industrial communities. An old population of rural farm laborers became a new class of
urban industrial laborers. This new class came to be called the working class. These
workers were concentrated in cities and the new power of an increasingly large and
restive mass began to make itself felt. The Industrial Revolution created social change,
unrest, and eventually turbulence. Deep-rooted traditions were rapidly overturned.
Within a short period of time the whole landscape of the country changed. In the
countryside, the open fields and communally worked farms were ‘enclosed’. The
enclosure movement improved efficiency and enabled the increased animal farming
necessary to feed a rapidly expanding population; but fewer laborers were required to
work the land, and that led to an exodus to the cities of large numbers of people seeking
employment. Increasing mechanization both on the land and in the industrial factories
meant continuing high levels of unemployment. Workers in the rural areas could no
longer graze the animals on which they partly depended for food and income. Acute
poverty followed. These developments literally altered the landscape of the country.
Open fields were enclosed by hedges and walls; in the cities, smoking factory chimneys
polluted the atmosphere; poor-quality houses were built in large numbers and quickly
became slums. The mental landscape also changed. The country was divided into
those who owned property or land –who were rich – and those who did not – who were
poor. A new world was born, which Benjamin Disraeli, who was both a novelist and
Prime Minister of Britain under Queen Victoria, was later to identify as ‘Two Nations’.

The Industrial Revolution paralleled revolutions in the political order. In fact, Britain was
at war during most of the Romantic period, with a resultant political instability. Political
movements in Britain were gradual, but in countries such as France and the United
States political change was both more rapid and more radical. The American
Declaration of Independence (from Britain) in 1776 struck an early blow for the principle
of democratic freedom and self-government, but it was the early years of the French
Revolution, with its slogan of ‘Equality, liberty and fraternity’, which most influenced the
intellectual climate in Britain. In this respect the storming of the Bastille in 1789, to
release political prisoners, acted as a symbol which attracted the strong support of
liberal opinion. Debate in Britain was, however, polarized between support for radical
documents such as Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), in which he called for greater
democracy in Britain, and Edmund Burke’s more conservative Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790). Later in the 1790s, more measured ideas are contained in
the writings of William Godwin, an important influence on the poets Wordsworth and
Shelley, who advocated a gradual evolution towards the removal of poverty and the
equal distribution of all wealth. Such a social philosophy caused much enthusiasm and
intellectual excitement among many radical writers and more liberal politicians; but
these ideas also represented a threat to the existing order. Positive use of the words
‘Jacobin’ or ‘radical’ was dangerous in the 1790s. ‘Jacobin’, in particular, which derived
from French, implied strong sympathy with ideals of absolute social equality.

However, as the French Revolution developed, support for it in Britain declined. There
was violence, extremism and much bloodshed as sections of the old aristocracy were
massacred, as the members of the new French Republic fought among themselves and
with other countries, and as Napoleon Bonaparte became emperor and then dictator of
France. In Britain these events were witnessed with some dismay. In The Prelude,
along autobiographical poem, Wordsworth wrote that in the early years of the French
Revolution ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’. But he later recorded his feeling that
the leaders of the French Republic had:

become Oppressors in their turn.

Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defense
For one of Conquest, losing sight of all
Which they had struggled for.

Support for the spirit of the early years of the French Revolution remained. Among more
liberal and radical thinkers there was a feeling of ambivalence when England went to
war against France and, after many years, finally defeated Napoleon at the Battle of
Waterloo in 1815. The victory was followed by years of social unrest at home. The end
of the war led to a decline in manufacturing output and to unemployment, as soldiers
returned from war to a world in which the divisions between the ‘two nations’ were
becoming sharper. In the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars the government
and ruling classes adopted especially repressive measures. These culminated in the
‘Peterloo Massacre’ of 1819, in which government troops charged a large group of
workers who were meeting in Manchester to demand social and political reforms. Nine
were killed and thousands more injured. The word ‘Peterloo’ ironically recalls the Battle
of Waterloo. Samuel Bamford’s account of the social and political unrest in the
Manchester area between 1816 and 1821, Passages in the Life of a Radical, first
published in 1884, although written more than twenty years after the events described,
is a valuable and vivid account of the Peterloo Massacre, full of descriptions, characters
and eye-witness accounts.

The period from 1820to 1832 was a time of continuing unrest. The unrest took place
against a background of the cycles of economic depression which so characterise the
modern world. The prevailing economic philosophy was that of laissez-faire, meaning
‘leave alone’. The consequences were that the government did not intervene directly in
economic affairs. It let the free market and private individual decisions control the
course of events. During this time, the wealth of the country grew, although it had
become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the new manufacturing and merchant
classes. This new middle class wanted to see its increased economic power reflected in
greater political power. A general alliance arose between working-class reformers,
liberal (called Whig) politicians and this new middle class, resulting in pressure on the
Tory government for political reform. After many struggles, and with the threat of
national disorder not far away, the first Reform Act was passed by Parliament in
. The bill extended voting rights to include a more representative proportion of
the country. The immediate benefits were limited, but the bill was of great symbolic
importance and a movement was started which would lead, decades later, to universal
suffrage and greater democracy in the country.

In terms of literary history, the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 is seen as a

landmark. The volume contains many of the best-known Romantic poems. The second
edition in 1800 contained a Preface in which Wordsworth discusses the theories of
poetry which were to be so influential on many of his and Coleridge’s contemporaries.
The Preface represents a poetic manifesto which is very much in the spirit of the age.
The movement towards greater freedom and democracy in political and social affairs is
paralleled by poetry which sought to overturn the existing regime and establish a new,
more ‘democratic’ poetic order. To do this, the writers used ‘the real language of men’
(Preface to Lyrical Ballads) and even, in the case of Byron and Shelley, got directly
involved in political activities themselves. The Romantic age in literature is often
contrasted with the Classical or Augustan age which preceded it. The comparison is
valuable, for it is not simply two different attitudes to literature which are being
compared but two different ways of seeing and experiencing life.

The Classical or Augustan age of the early and mid-eighteenth century stressed the
importance of reason and order. Strong feelings and flights of the imagination had to be
controlled (although they were obviously found widely, especially in poetry). The swift
improvements in medicine, economics, science and engineering, together with rapid
developments in both agricultural and industrial technology, suggested human progress
on a grand scale. At the centre of these advances towards a perfect society was
mankind, and it must have seemed that everything was within man’s grasp if his baser,
bestial instincts could be controlled. The Classical temperament trusts reason, intellect,
and the head. The Romantic temperament prefers feelings, intuition, and the heart.
There are further contrasts in the ways in which children are regarded and represented
in Classical and Romantic literature. For the Augustan writer the child is only important
because he or she will develop into an adult. The child’s savage instincts must be
trained, making it civilised and sophisticated. For the Romantic writer the child is holy
and pure and its proximity to God will only be corrupted by civilisation. The child then is
a source of natural and spontaneous feeling. When Wordsworth wrote that ‘the Child is
father of the Man’ (in My Heart Leaps Up) he stressed that the adult learns from the
experience of childhood.

The two ages may be contrasted in other ways: the Classical writer looks outward to
society, Romantic writers look inward to their own soul and to the life of the imagination;
the Classical writer concentrates on what can be logically measured and rationally
understood, Romantic writers are attracted to the irrational, mystical and supernatural
world; the Classical writer is attracted to a social order in which everyone knows his
place, Romantic writers celebrate the freedom of nature and of individual human
experience. In fact, the writings of the Augustan age stress the way societies improve
under careful regulation; Romantic literature is generally more critical of society and its
injustices, questioning rather than affirming, exploring rather than defining.
The language and form of the literature of the two ages also shows these two different
ways of seeing. The Augustans developed a formal and ordered way of writing
characterised by the balance and symmetry of the heroic couplet in poetry and by an
adherence to the conventions of a special poetic diction. The Romantics developed
ways of writing which tried to capture the ebb and flow of individual experience in forms
and language which were intended to be closer to everyday speech and more
accessible to the general reader. Here is an extract from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads
(in the revised version of 1802): The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in
these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or
describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really
used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of
imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual
way.

Contrasts between the Augustan and Romantic ages are helpful but there are always
exceptions to such general contrasts. For example, eighteenth-century writers such as
Gray, Collins and Cowper show a developing Romantic sensibility, and Romantic poets
such as Byron were inspired by Augustan poetic models. Romanticism was not a
sudden, radical transformation, but grew out of Augustanism. Furthermore, English
Romanticism contrasts with mainland European Romanticism which, for example, tends
to be more politically motivated and philosophically radical. It is therefore unwise to
make too many unqualified generalisations about Romanticism.

One final introductory point can be made about the Romantic period. The English
Romantic literature discussed in the following sections grew out of specific historical
contexts. The Industrial Revolution led to an increasing regimentation of the individual.
Small towns and villages, where everyone knew their neighbours, began to disappear.
They were replaced by a more impersonal, mechanised society, fed and clothed by
mass production. In this new world individuals lost their identity. The writers of this time
wanted to correct this imbalance by giving greater value to the individual sensibility and
to the individual consciousness. Their poetic revolution aimed at greater individual
freedoms.

‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’ are words written by Wordsworth (in The Prelude)
at what he felt to be the dawn of a new age. It was an age in which the uniqueness of
the individual would be celebrated. It was a time of war, a time of ideals, a time of
freedom, and of oppression. Its conflicts and contradictions breathed new life into
literature and, in particular, into poetry.

The Romantic period is seen today as a crucial time in history. It embodies many of the
conflicts and ideological debates which are still at the heart of the modern world;
political freedom/repression, individual and collective responsibility, masculine and
feminine roles (until recently the traditional canon of Romanticism was almost
exclusively male), past, present, and future. These issues recur time and again in
Romantic writing. It was a time when ideologies were in the melting-pot, when
radicalism and tradition change and stability, the old and the new, were just as vital as
the more traditionally literary themes of innocence/experience, youth/age, country/city,
man/nature, language/expression. Many of these issues are as alive today as they were
two hundred years ago. The recovery of many female writers’ works in recent years is
one significant sign that our relationship to the Romantic period is an ongoing and ever-
changing one. In many ways, we are all post-Romantics.

The Literary Trends: The Romantic Movement in English Literature As

part of the Romantic Movement in European Literature.
Following the Enlightenment and its impact on literature, there was a period of literature
in Western Europe generally known as the Romantic Movement. As a literary
movement it came earliest in Germany, with the "Sturm und Drang" ("Storm and
Stress") of the late 18th century; it began in England a little later, with the roman-tic
precursors in late 18th century and then the great romantic poets in the last years of the
18th century and the first two decades of the19th; and it arrived last in France, flowering
in the early 19thcentury, with Victor Hugo, Chateaubriand, Beranger, Lamartine and
George Sand.

Taken as a whole, the literature of the Romantic Movement, whether in England,

Germany or France, expressed a more or less negative attitude of the different social
strata of the time toward the existing social and political conditions that came with the
industrial revolution and the growing importance of the bourgeoisie. How-ever, such
negation emanated from quite different stands and with entirely different aims in view.
Some literary spokesmen of romanticism spoke for the aristocracy who lost out in their
battle for supremacy with the bourgeoisie, some pleaded on behalf of the patriarchal
peasantry that suffered from the agrarian revolution and the industrial revolution, while
others stood for the new industrial proletariat suffering from increased tyranny and
exploitation after the industrial revolution and the Napoleonic wars.

In England the literary output of the Romantic Movement appeared as early as the mid-
18th century, with nature poetry in "The Seasons" (1726-30) of James Thomson,
sentimentalism in Edward Young's "Night Thoughts" (1742-44), and in Laurence
Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" (1759-67), medievalism in James MacPherson's "The
Poems of Ossian" (1765), in Thomas Chat-terton's "Rowley Poems" (1777), in Thomas
Percy's edition of old ballads "The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" (1765), and in
the Gothic romances of Horace Walpole ("The Castle of Otranto",1764) and of Mrs.
Anne Radcliffe ("The Mysteries of Udolpho",1794). These works, mostly of minor
significance artistically, were written in reaction to the realistic writings of Fielding and
Smollett and Sheridan, to the works of Samuel Johnson and Richardson and to the
poetry of Thomas Gray and William Cowper. Toward the end of the 18th century,
romanticism found its expression chiefly in the poetry of the great Scottish peasant poet
Robert Burns (1759-1796) and of the poor engraver poet of London William Blake
(1757-1827).

But it was not until the very last years of the 18th century and the first two decades of
the 19th that romanticism as a literary movement in England reached its full flowering,
especially in the realm of poetry where the works of Byron and Shelley and Keats
appeared side by side with the verse of the "Lake poets" Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Walter Scott, both a poet of Scottish literary heritage and a great master of historical
fiction, carried the spirit of romanticism first into Scottish folk and legendary verse and
then into vivid prose narrations of people and events of the past not only of Scotland but
also of England and other European countries, quite in contrast to the other well-known
novelist of this period, Jane Austen, who in her few novels reported chiefly in minute
detail the everyday life of landed gentry, to the neglect of weighty social and political
themes of her day. This was also an age of romantic essays. Aside from William
Cobbett whose popular prose took the form essential-ly of journalistic tracts and
Coleridge with his critical essays, the outstanding "romantic" essayists of the first
decades of the 19thcentury include William Hazlitt with a somewhat progressive stand,
Thomas de Quincey with his decadent outlook and Charles Lamb in the middle ground,
sympathizing with the poor but getting absorbed most of the time in his whimsical and
dreamy sort of subjectivity. Two other prose writers of some repute were Leigh Hunt, a
representative of the bourgeois liberals of the day who leaned slightly to the left, and
Walter Savage Landor who was a classicist and a formalist.

The era of the Romantic Movement in the early 19th century English literature was a
period of great poetry and great prose. The imperishable poetry of Byron, Shelley and
Keats as well as Words-worth and Coleridge, the great historical fiction of Walter
Scotland the scintillating, humorous essays of William Hazlitt and Char-les Lamb are
among the invaluable gems in the treasure-house of English literature.

The Return to Nature

Feeling for nature sees the full effects of the movement, and the subsequent reaction
that followed.

1. Abundant Output. Even the lavishness of the Elizabethans cannot excel that of
this age. The development of new ideas brings fresh inspiration for poetry, and
the poetical sky is bright with luminaries of the first magnitude. In prose we may
note especially the fruitful yield of the novel, the rejuvenation of the essay, and
the unprecedented activity of critical and miscellaneous writers. This is the most
fertile period of our literature.

2. Great Range of Subject. The new and buoyant race of writers, especially the
poets, lays the knowledge and experience of all ages under a heavy toll. The
classical writers are explored anew, and are drawn upon by the genius of Keats
and Shelley; the Middle Ages inspire the novels of Scott and the poems of
Coleridge, Southey, and many more; modern times are analyzed and dissected
in the work of the novelists, the satires of Byron, and the productions of the
miscellaneous writers. This is indeed the return to nature, for all nature is
scrutinized and summed up afresh.

3. Treatment of Nature. If for the moment we take the restricted meaning of the
word, and understand by 'nature' the common phenomena of earth, air, and sea,
 we find the poetical attitude to nature altering profoundly. In the work of Cowper,
Crabbe, and Gray the treatment is principally the simple chronicle and
sympathetic observation of natural features. In the new race of poets the
observation becomes more matured and intimate. Notably in the case of
Wordsworth, the feeling for nature rises to a passionate veneration that is love
and religion too. To Wordsworth nature is not only a procession of seasons and
seasonal fruition: it is the eye of all things, natural and supernatural, into which
the observant soul can peer and behold the spirit that inhabits all things. Nature
is thus amplified and glorified; it is to be sought, not only in the flowers and the
fields, but also in the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

4. Political and Periodical Writing. The age did not produce a pamphleteer of the
first class like Swift or Burke, but the turbulence of the period was clearly marked
in the immense productivity of its political writers. The number of periodicals was
greatly augmented, and we notice the first of the great daily journals that are still
a strong element in literature and politics. The Morning Chronicle (1769) was
started by William Wood fall, The Morning Post (1772) by a syndicate of London
tradesmen, and The Times (1785), under the name of The Daily Universal
Register, by John Walter. Of a more irresponsible type were the Radical Political
Register (1802) of Cobbett and The Examiner (1808) of Leigh Hunt. A race of
powerful literary magazines sprang to life: The Edinburgh Review (1802), The
Quarterly Review (1809), Blackwood's Magazine (1817), The London Magazine
(1820), and The Westminster Review (1824). Such excellent publications reacted
strongly upon authorship, and were responsible for much of the best work of
Hazlitt, Lamb, Southey, and a host of other miscellaneous writers.

5. The Influence of Germany. The increasing bitterness of the long war with
France almost extinguished the literary influence of the French language, which,
as was indicated in the last chapter, had been affecting English literature deeply.
In the place of French, the study of German literature and learning came rapidly
into favor. The first poetical work of Scott is based on the German, and the
effects of the new influence can be further observed in the works of Coleridge,
Shelley, Byron, and many more. In the course of time German increased its hold
upon English, until by the middle of the nineteenth century it was perhaps the
dominating foreign tongue.

6. American Literature. Already the infant nation across the Atlantic was showing
promise of a literary future. As might be expected, the first efforts were largely
imitations of the more mature English products; but in Fennimore Cooper the
 novel had a good beginning, and Washington Irving is the first of the line of
notable American men of letters.

Wordsworth
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were known as “Lake Poets" because they lived
and knew one another in the last few years of the 18th century in the district of the great
lakes in North western England. The former two published a book of poems ("The
Lyrical Ballads") together in 1798, while all three of them had radical inclinations in their
youth but later turned conservative and received favours from the great (pensions and
poet laureateships). They were attacked consistently by Byron as the "Lakers", and
Southey launched his counterattack on Byron and Shelley. This conflict between the
two camps was, however, not simply one of personal animosity, but in a way reflected
the broad social struggle between the landed aristocracy and the oppressed multitude
of the English people, for the Lake Poets criticized the industrialized capitalist society by
advocating the return to the patriarchal society of the past while Byron and Shelley
attacked the forces of oppression and exploitation both feudal and capitalist and called
on the oppressed people to rise against earthly tyrants. Curiously enough, however,
Byron and Shelley came from aristocratic families while Wordsworth and Coleridge and
Southey originated from the petty bourgeoisie.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was the oldest and best known of the Lake Poets. He
was born in the family of an attorney in Cumberland, and received his education at
Cambridge University. In 1790 and then again in 1791-92 he travelled and resided for
some time in France during the early days of the French Revolution; he seemed at first
to be somewhat attracted to the slogans of "liberty, fraternity and equality", but was
soon shocked by the bloodshed during "the September massacres" and the "Reign of
Terror" as the Jacobins came into power. Gradually he became a Conservative in
politics. He obtained some legacies from some "gentleman friend" and from a Lord
Lonsdale, his father's patron, and these incomes enabled him to live for a number of
years, together with his sister Dorothy, in the district of the great lakes in north-western
England, where he made friends with Coleridge and Southey and where he was
engaged chiefly in writing poetry. In 1798, in collaboration with Coleridge, he published
his first major volume of poetry, entitled "The Lyrical Ballads", which was at first not well
received by the public. A second edition appeared in 1800 with a significant "Preface"
affixed to it and excited some hostility from the critics. But years later the poems
became hailed not only in England but in the whole Western world as an epoch-making
book in English poetry.

In the winter of 1798, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and Coleridge went to Germany.
In the following year Wordsworth and Dorothy returned to England and lived near the
lake of Grasmere for eight years. In the meantime he married and made occasional
visits to Scotland where he met Walter Scott. He continued to live a quiet life in the
countryside and to write poetry. One volume after another was printed but they met with
adverse criticism. In1813 he was given, through the influence of the Earl of Lonsdale, a
sinecure as distributor of stamps in the county of West moorland with a substantial
annual income.

In the same year he moved to Rydal Mount, near Grasmere, where he lived for 37
years, till his death. He took trips again and again to Scotland and to the continent of
Europe, chiefly to Italy. Then, beginning from the late 1830s he became known as a
poet. He was honoured with the honorary degree of the Doctor of Civil Laws at Oxford
University in 1839, and in 1842 he received through Sir Robert Peel an annual pension
from the Crown, after he resigned from his job of distributor of stamps in favour of his
son. In 1843, upon the death of Robert Southcy he was offered the Poet-Laureate-ship
and in 1844 Lord Jeffrey, the severest of his literary critics, wrote in the "Edinburgh
Review" in praise of the poet's great merits.

Wordsworth had a long poetic career and turned out many volumes of poetry, but his
major poems were written all in the last decade of the 18th century and the first quarter
of the 19th century. His earliest poems, "An Evening Walk" (written 1787-89, published
1793) and "Descriptive Sketches" (1793) were descriptive records of his travels in the
lake district in north western England and also in Switzerland and France and they
already revealed the poet's ab-sorption in nature and natural scenery which was to last
through his life. In the latter poem should be noted also his attitude toward the French
Revolution which he still considered as the symbol of liberty at the time, though not
without misgivings. Among these earliest poems should be mentioned also "Guilt and
Sorrow" (written in 1793-94; published 1842) in which the poet relates with a great deal
of sympathy for the wretched sailor and the still more miserable widow of a soldier and
criticized the "frauds" that took all the sailor earned and thus led him to murder, as well
as the "severe mischance and cruel wrong" and the "disease and famine, agony and
fear of war that brought misery and woe to the soldier's widow. Here he seemed to
blame the "social order" as he wrote, "Bad is the world, and hard is the world's law".

Although in some of his poems appearing in the two editions of "The Lyrical Ballads" of
1798 and 1800 and in his long auto-biographical poem "The Prelude" which he finished
writing in 1805,Wordsworth already showed his unfavourable attitude toward the
Jacobin Dictatorship stage of the French Revolution (e.g., Sonnet: One might believe
that natural miseries / Had blasted France, and made of it a land / Unfit for men), yet he
also wrote during this period quite a number of poems showing his unmistakable
sympathy for the common people in his protests against military aggression and political
tyranny in the international scene. In "To Toussant L' Ouverture" he praised the Negro
chieftain who led an up-rising in Haiti; in "On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic" be
bewailed the loss of freedom for the Venetian people; in "Thoughts of a Briton on the
Subjugation of Switzerland" he showed much sympathy for the Swiss people who lost
their liberty upon the invasion of the French army; in "Rob Roy's Grave" he lamented
the death of Rob Roy who fought for the freedom of the poor people in Scot-land; in
"Milton, Thou Shouldst Be Living at This Hour" he ex-pressed his wish for someone like
Milton to defend the freedom of the English people at the time. In fact, besides these
outstanding and well-known sonnets that are remembered not only for their lofty
thoughts but also for their artistic finish, there were many other poems, mostly sonnets,
written by Wordsworth in defence of nation-al liberty and in condemnation of political
tyranny, not alone in his youth but also in his later years (e.g., his sonnets on the
Tyrolese fight for liberty, on the struggle of the Spanish guerrillas against French
invaders in 1811, on the plight of the French army in Russia in 1812-13 and on the
Battle of Waterloo). He was particularly anxious over the threatened invasion of England
by the French army under Napoleon, and so his numerous sonnets written in eu-logy of
"British freedom" during the years of the Napoleonic wars are easily understandable as
showing his patriotic feelings while he was obviously unaware of the regressive
conservatism of the British ruling class in league at the time with the reactionary
regimes of Russia, Austria and Prussia (e.g., Sonnets: "Inland, within a hollow vale, I
stood", "It is not to be thought of that the flood", "Vanguard of liberty, ye men of Kent").
Also it should be pointed out here that Wordsworth was ever in sympathy with the
oppression from which the Negroes suffered at the time (e.g., Sonnets: "To Thomas
Clarkson, on the Final Passing of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, March,
1807" and "Driven from the soil of France, a female came").

More striking are the numerous poems among Wordsworth's early works that deal with
the simple rural folk whom the poet was familiar with as a result of his long stay in the
Lake District. The best known of these are the Lucy poems, all five of which describe
with rare elusive beauty of simple lyricism and haunting rhythm the lowly country girl
leading her simple life of obscurity far away from civilization. Especially in "Strange fits
of passion I have known "and "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" there is the
peculiar charm of simple tales of simple emotions told in simple words in simple ballad
metre. Likewise the three simple poems celebrating the simple emotions of an old
village schoolmaster Matthew ("Matthew", "The Two April Mornings", "The Fountain, A
Conversation")are memorable for the poet's overflowing sympathy for the sad, aged
patriarch as the latter reminisces about the death of his daughter of nine and complains
of the "heavy laws" oppressing the poor folk.

In a goodly number of similar poems Wordsworth revealed his true compassion for the
sufferings of the poor and the unfortunate on the mountains and near the lakes where
he dwelt. "The Affliction of Margaret" and "The Sailor's Mother" record the sad wailings
of two old mothers over the loss of their sons: in the former the lonely parent has all
sorts of apprehensions about the fate of her only son gone for seven years as she
hopes against hope forhis return, while in the latter the beggar mother knows her sailor
lad to be dead and her only treasure left is the bird and its cage left behind by her son.
At greater length and with stronger feelings are narrated the story of an old shepherd
Michael whose son has gone to the bad after leaving the pastoral scene for "the
dissolute city"(in "Michael"). In all three poems the sorrows of the parents are the
sharper because in their old age their sons have become their only hope and support in
life. "Michael" is a powerful poem with its detailed descriptions of the simple life of the
shepherd and of his strong affections for his only son Luke born to him in his old age,
but Wordsworth wrote other moving tales about the aged and the helpless that are at
least equally effective. In "The Last of the Flock" a poor shepherd has to sell all fifty of
his sheep in order to feed his family of six children as now he holds in his arms a little
lamb as the last of his flock and bewails his fate in "an evil time". In "Simon Lee, the Old
Huntsman" the aged hunter as "poorest of the poor" is now barely alive and he and his
wife Ruth can hardly till their small scrap of land or even unearth the root of an old tree.
Similarly, in "The Old Cumberland Beggar" a solitary aged beggar creeps from door to
door and barely keeps himself alive on alms. But the poet seems to have his strongest
sympathy for the old leech-gatherer in "Resolution and Independence". Here "the oldest
man he seemed that ever wore grey hairs", appearing "not all alive nor dead, / nor all
asleep", but "motionless as a cloud", the leech-gatherer stirs the pond with his staff and
has to travel far and wide to gather leeches for his livelihood. While admiring the old
man for his "resolution and independence" the poet really showers his compassion on
the wretched person who stands for "solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty".
Although in these poems Wordsworth was obviously preaching the doctrine of
meekness and stoicism by praising those poor and aged people for bearing their
hardships in silence and submitting to God's will patiently, and al-though in "Michael"
may even be detected the poet's eulogy of patriarchal happiness or "return to nature",
yet in these "simple annals of the poor" the poet's genuine fellow-feeling for the aged
and the poor and the miserable is unmistakable and there is nothing condescending
about it. "Goody Blake and Harry Gill" is possibly the only exception among poems of
this kind, for here in-stead of asking for charity from the wealthy or blaming the poor for
any breach of law, Wordsworth chastised the hard-hearted rich in the person of Harry
Gill who very wilily seizes the lonely old Goody Blake upon her theft of a bundle of sticks
from his hedge at night, and who eventually is stricken with ague-fits as a sort of divine
justice in answer to Goody's prayers. The whole tone of the poem shows all too clearly
Wordsworth's infinite pity for the ill fed, thinly-clad Goody and his strong antipathy
toward the cunning, uncharitable Harry so that the poet forgives the poor woman's
thieving but condemns the young drover's heartlessness and lack of charity.

Wordsworth also wrote with much sympathy about very small children suffering from
poverty and misery. "Alice Fell" tells of the extreme poverty and helplessness of an
orphan whose weather-beaten rag of a cloak caught in the wheels of a post-chaise was
an occasion for her loud and piteous sobs because it was the only property she had in
the wide world. In "Lucy Gray" there is a more vivid picture of a small child who loses
her way in a stormy night and is never found again, but the poet weaves about her a
strange legend of wishful thinking that "the solitary child mays till be seen tripping along
upon the lonesome wild" and singing "a solitary song / That whistles in the wind". In
"Ruth" the poet traces the life experience of a girl of seven "left desolate" and
"wandering over dale and hill" "at her own will", down to her adulthood when she is
deserted by a sailor lad and then flees from a prison and eventually becomes a beggar.
Wordsworth's com-passion for the unfortunate even extends to an idiot boy (in "The
Idiot Boy") whose errand to fetch a doctor for an ailing old woman turns out to be an
escapade with his pony to a waterfall to listen to the owls all night under the moon.
Though the desperate worries of the mother over possible mischances befalling her son
and her all-night search for him far and wide end eventually in her happy discovery of
Johnny, yet the inescapable tragic implications of the idiocy of the boy are very
definitely given here with much sympathy from the author.

Perhaps Wordsworth's genuine affection for very innocent children is nowhere so

effectively shown as in the simple poem "We Are Seven". Here a little cottage girl of
eight with no idea of what death means is vividly portrayed in a simple dialogue in which
the child with great naiveté insists that her dead brother and sister are still with her. In a
way a poem like this inevitably leads to Words-worth's platonic view of the pre-existence
of the soul that find sits full expression in his later and better-known poem, "Ode on
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. "The idea that the
human soul exists before one is born originated with Plato (in his "Phaedo" and
"Phaedrus") but it was some-what modified by the neo-platonists and then Henry
Vaughan, a17th-century English poet, wrote about it in his poem "The Re-treat".
Wordsworth probably fell under the influence of Vaugh an but he acknowledged the
view of pre-existence as "far too shadowy a notion to be recommended to faith", in
order to avoid offending orthodox believers in Christianity. "Ode on Intimations of
Immortality" has been very higbly praised in the Western world and has had much
influence upon many English poets of the late19th century and even the early 20th,
chiefly because of its lyrical beauty and the poet's undisguised account of his
philosophical growth from childhood to manhood. However, Wordsworth's high eulogy
of "Delight and liberty, the simple creed Of Childhood" bears strong resemblance to the
theory of "return to nature" or the idealization of primitive society or patriarchies that
constituted part of the tradition of romanticism prevalent in Europe in the late 18th and
early 19th century, and it tends toward mysticism and idealist philosophy. Although
Wordsworth ends the poem by emphasizing "the soothing thoughts that spring / Out of
human suffering" and "years that bring the philosophic mind", yet he still shows his
yearning for those first affections, / those shadowy recollections" of his childhood days
because "Heaven lies about us in our infancy!" This is certainly idealism, not
materialism.

Another important group of Wordsworth's verse, throughout his literary career but
especially in his early period, includes his numerous shorter poems on the theme of
nature. He frequently sang of birds and plants with much rapture and he also wrote
lyrics to exalt nature as an important source of his inspiration. In his poems entitled "To
a Butterfly" ("Stay near me- do not take thy flight", and "I've watched you now a full half
hour"), "To a Skylark" (Up with me! up with me in to the clouds!" and "Ethereal minstrel!
Pilgrim of the sky!"), "To the Cuckoo" ("O blithe new-comer! I have heard", and "Not the
whole warbling grove in concert heard") and "The Green Linnet" ("Beneath these fruit-
tree boughs that shed"), Words-worth revealed his spontaneous joy in seeing and
hearing these creatures of the animal kingdom, often with boyish enthusiasm, and
reflected in some cases his love of nature in contrast with his misgivings toward the
human society. In most cases these poems at least equal if not surpass even the best-
known poems on nature by the pre-romantics James Thomson, William Collins and
William Cowper of the late 18th century, both as genuine expressions of the poet's
raptures over the world of nature and as verse specimens of artistic beauty. Wordsworth
also wrote a goodly number of poems on the plant world. While his earlier pieces such
as "To the Daisy", "To the Small Celandine" and "Nutting", merely record the poet's
hearty enjoyment of flowers and trees, a later poem like "I Wandered Lonely as a
Cloud" not only shows his joy at the sight of the beautiful daffodils but also reflects the
philosophical depth of his mind under the enchantment of nature. Then there are also a
number of poems written by Words-worth on the powerful effect of wild nature upon the
poet's thoughts and emotions: the sight of the rainbow moves him in mountain echo "My
Heart Leaps Up", the hearing of the provokes his philosophical contemplations in "The
Echo", and the visit to the mountain pass inspires him to meditations of eternity in "The
Simplon Pass". In these poems the deep impressions engraved upon the poet by these
different natural objects are vested in glowing language and deliberative cadence.
Similar to these but much more rhapsodic is a poem of his later years, "Com-posed
upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty". Here the poet was obviously
struck by the unusual sight of an evening glow which so impressed him with its rare
Splendour and beauty that he uttered his poignant outpourings of spiritual communion
with nature in his adoration of

"this silent spectacle the gleam

The shadow and the peace supreme!"

In the second, of the four sections in the poem there is a rare specimen of an inspired
picture of natural beauty in verse:
 No sound is uttered,-but a deep

And solemn harmony pervades

The hollow vale from steep to steep,

And penetrates the glades.

Far-distant images draw nigh,

Called forth by wondrous potency

Of beamy radiance, that imbues

Whate'er it strikes with gem-like hues!

In vision exquisitely clear,

Herds range along the mountain side;

And glistening antlers are descried;

And gilded flocks appear.

Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve!

But long as god-like wish, or hope divine,

Informs my spirit, ne'er can I believe

That this magnificence is wholly thine!

- From worlds not quickened by the sun

A portion of the gift is won;

An intermingling of Heaven's pomp is spread

On grounds which British shepherds tread!

Although there is a trace of pantheistic worship of nature in the last few lines, although
the last section of the poem suggests very definitely the view of the pre-existence of the
soul that is more explicitly given in "Ode on Intimations of Immortality", this piece of
rhymed verse of varied metrical lengths is certainly one of the most beautiful lyrical
passages on nature ever written by Wordsworth.

Quite a few of Wordsworth's early poems on nature relate the poet's view that more can
be learned from the world of nature than from books or other sources. In "Expostulation
and Reply" and "The Tables Turned" Wordsworth in his imaginary conversation with a
friend named Matthew argued against the reading of too many books on art and science
and spoke of the importance of gathering wisdom and truth from the Jinnet and the
throstle, from the green fields and the vernal wood. More significant is the poem "To My
Sister" ("It is the first mild day of March") in which the poet explained more at length his
philosophical view of nature:

Love, now a universal birth,

From heart to heart is stealing,

From earth to man, from man to earth,

It is the hour of feeling.

One moment now may give us more

Than fifty years of reason:

Our minds shall drink at every pore

The spirit of the season.

The thought here almost resembles Emerson's transcendentalist view of nature, though
it is the result not of the poet's solitary musing son the relation between man and nature
and God but rather the expression of his joy in nature during his happy associations
with his sister Dorothy. In fact, the poet revealed in several of his lyrics his indebtedness
to Dorothy for his enjoyment of the world of nature. "The Sparrow's Nest" is perhaps the
most celebrated of his shorter poems on this theme:

The blessing of my later years

Was with me when a boy:

She gave me eyes, she gave me cars;

And humble cares, and delicate fears;

A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;

And love, and thought, and joy.

All these fervent lyrics on nature reveal Wordsworth's attitude to-ward the whole natural
world as well as his innermost thoughts and emotions accompanying this attitude. They
constitute an integral part of the tradition of romantic poetry in early 19th-century
England. They have been widely read and eulogized as an important part of England's
poetic heritage and have exerted their broad and lasting influence both in the English-
speaking world and elsewhere.

The most outstanding single poem on nature by Wordsworth is unquestionably "Tintern

Abbey" (full title: "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"). Here the poet
relates his genuine feelings as "a worshipper of nature" in connection with his deep
impressions gathered during his second visit to this spot of wild nature. While he
remembers his reactions toward nature in his boyhood and early youth ("the coarser
pleasures of my boyish days, And their glad animal movements", and the "aching joys
"and "dizzy raptures" "of thoughtless youth"), he stressed the effect of nature upon him
in his days of maturity,

"Hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things."

This attitude of his toward nature is somewhat pantheistic, but by linking up nature with
the mind of man his philosophy resembles Emerson's. On the other hand, as he
elsewhere in the poem grate-fully addresses himself to the river Wye,

"oh! how oft -

In darkness and amid the many shapes

Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir

 Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,

Have hung upon the beatings of my heart

How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,

O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer through the woods,

How often has my spirit turned to thee!"

Wordsworth was actually uttering some thoughts of his not similar to the words of envy
with which Keats addressed the nightingale in his "Ode", though Keats in his poverty
must have suffered more severely from

"The weariness, the fever, and the fret

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan"

than ever did Wordsworth with his "legacies" and his sinecure. At any rate, in "Tintern
Abbey", more than in many of his other poems, the poet was revealing unreservedly his
innermost thought sand emotions with regard to the natural world intertwined with
human society. This chiefly accounts for the strong appeal it has had upon the reading
public ever since its publication.

"The Prelude", considered by many critics as one of Words-worth's most important

works and his chief long poem, was not published till shortly after Wordsworth had
written his "Tintern Abbey" and had planned to write a long philosophical poem "The
Recluse" to which he wanted to affix an account of his own development as a poet.
According to most recent research the poet probably finished writing the first two parts
by late 1799 (two manuscripts were recently discovered of that date), then he probably
ex-panded the poem after 1801, and by 1805 he completed 13 books which he read to
Coleridge in that year, and then the poet kept on making revisions on the poem up till
1839, but the poem, now containing 14 books, was never published in the poet's
lifetime. The title of "The Prelude" was given by Mrs. Wordsworth, the poet's wife, but
Wordsworth himself referred to it variously as "the poem to Coleridge", "the poem on the
growth of my own mind" and "the poem on my own poetical education". The reason the
poet withheld the publication all his lifetime is not definitely known. One guess perhaps
as good as any other would be the poet's unwilling-ness to make such self-revelation as
was provided by the book.

"The Prelude" falls very obviously into two parts. The first eight books tell of his early
life, beginning with "Introduction -Childhood and School Time", "Residence at
Cambridge", "Summer Vacation", "Books", "Cambridge and the Alps", "Residence in
London", and ending with a book on "Retrospect", while the last six books about his
growing maturity contain three books on his experience in France, then two on
"Imagination and Taste, How Impaired and Restored" and then "Conclusion". On the
whole, "The Prelude" provides very uneven reading, because while the reared quite a
number of passages that are truly engrossing and soaring flights of poetry, there are
many more lines that prove to be extremely dull and long-winded when the poet
indulges in abstruse philosophizing and tiring moralizing’s.

The first two books of "The Prelude" are highly nostalgic, as the poet recalls his boyish
enjoyment of nature and describes the re-membered episodes of his nightly wanderings
in the cold season and his sailing a stolen boat on a summer eve when he was only ten
year sold, and then as he narrates how in his school-days he and his companions find
their joys in rural objects and in wild nature. The next three books show the poet's
essential unfitness for Cambridge and for books, so that his experience in returning to
his native hills in his summer vacation is highlighted with his raptures in meeting old
acquaintances and visiting familiar grounds and here his enduringaffection for nature
and for rural folk is once again brought to the fore. The records of Wordsworth's visit to
the Alps in Book Six again contain his rhapsodic descriptions of wild nature, especially
of the summit of Mont Blanc and the Vale of Chamouny and of Locarno and Como
Lakes, and his occasional references to the spirit of Liberty. And this love of nature that
seems to run through the early six books is very definitely reinforced by his apparent
disapproval of much that he finds in London in Book Seven, though he admittedly
shows some admiration for a number of well-known places and renowned men in the
English capital. The eighth book "Recompense" is important as its sub-title "Love of
Nature Leading to Love of Man" clearly indicates. In this summing-up of the growth of
his mind the poet recapitulates practically the same analysis as in "Tintern Abbey", as
he first describes his attitude toward nature in his early years thus:

Nature, prized

For her own sake, became my joy, even then

And upwards through late youth, until not less

Than two and twenty summers had been told

Was Man in my affections and regards

Subordinate to her, her visible forms

And viewless agencies: a passion, she,

A rapture often, and immediate love

Ever at hand; he, only a delight

 Occasional, an accidental grace,,

His hour being not yet come.

And then at the end of the book, after the poet's recapitulation of his impressions
gathered from his residences in Cambridge and in London, he admits his greater
interest in humanity:

My thoughts by slow gradations had been drawn

To human kind, and to the good and ill

Of human life: Nature had led me on."

Although the first eight books of "The Prelude" contain many admirable passages of the
poet's personal thoughts and feelings inreaction to his childhood and school days, to his
experience at Cam-bridge and the Alps and London, it is the three books (the 9th,
10thand 11th) on his experience in France that point out the turmoil in the poet's mind
and gives us an insight into his conservative out-look. Wordsworth first gives a rather
lengthy description of his "residence in France", beginning with his short visit to Paris on
his way to the "sojourn" "in a pleasant town" on the shore of the Loire, as "France Lured
me forth". In the French capital he went to the "clamorous Halls, The National Synod
and the Jacobins "and "stared and listened" to "Hawkers and Haranguers, hubbub wild!
And hissing Factionists with ardent eyes, / In knots, or pairs, or single" and "Watched
every gesture uncontrollable, / Of anger, and vexation, and despite." But set against
these apparent-ly none-too-favourable impressions was the poet's enthusiastic attitude
toward the storming of the Bastille in 1789:

"Where silent zephyrs sported with the dust

Of the Bastille, I sate in the open sun,

And from the rubbish gathered up a stone,

And pocketed the relic, in the guise

Of an enthusiast."

His adventures on the Loire involved much mental tumult within the poet, but he

"ere long

Became a patriot; and my heart was all

Given to the people, and my love was theirs."

He associated chiefly with "a band of military officers", all "men well-born" and
"defenders of the Crown", but

"'Twas in truth an hour

Of universal ferment; mildest men

Were agitated; and commotions, strife

Of passion and opinion, filled the walls

Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds."

And there was the talk everywhere "Of natural rights and civil", and

"Of a Republic, where all stood thus far

Upon equal ground; that we were brothers all

In honour, as in one community,

Scholars and gentlemen; where, furthermore,

Distinction open lay to all that came,

And wealth and titles were in less esteem

Than talents, worth, and prosperous industry."

And he and his companions on the one hand pointed to themselves

"the miseries

Of royal courts, and that voluptuous life

Unfeeling, where the man who is of soul

The meanest thrives the most."

while on the other hand they

"saw, in rudest men,

Self-sacrifice the firmest; generous love,

And continence of mind, and sense of right,

Uppermost in the midst of fiercest strife."

 And it became his and their hope and dream

"that poverty

Abject as this would in a little time

Be found no more, that we should see the earth

Unthwarted in her wish to recompense

The meek, the lowly, patient child of toil,

All institutes forever blotted out

That legalized exclusion, empty pomp

Abolished, sensual state and cruel power

Whether by edict of the one or few;

And finally, as sum and crown of all,

Should see the people having strong hand

In framing their own laws; whence better days

To all mankind."

The poet's enthusiasm for the prospect promised by the French Revolution then is here
unmistakable!

Then Wordsworth again visited Paris, just a month after the "Sep-tember massacres",
and he recorded how he was horrified by the events that had happened there: King
Louis XVI had fallen from his throne (as he "passed / The prison where the unhappy
monarch lay, Associate with his children and his wife / In bondage"),"The dead, upon
the dying heaped" at the square of the Carousa!,the "Denunciation of the Crimes Of
Maximilian Robespierre "by "one bold man" and Robespierre's counter-accusation.
While the poet's "inmost soul / Was agitated", he yet did not doubt at that time

But that the virtue of one paramount mind

Would have abashed those impious crests have

quelled

Outrage and bloody power, and in despite

Of what the People long had been and were

 Through ignorance and false teaching, sadder proof

Of immaturity, and in the teeth

Of desperate opposition from without

Have cleared a passage for just government,

And left a solid birthright to the State,

Redeemed, according to example given

By ancient lawgivers."

So, upon his return to England ("dragged by a chain of harsh necessity"), he brought
with him

the faith

That, if France prospered, good men would not long

Pay fruitless worship to humanity;"

and so he was much disappointed when England joined with certain other European
powers in a war against France.

But the milder Girondists were in power during Wordsworth's stay in France. Soon the
more radical Jacobins overthrew the Girondists, and there came an obvious change in
Wordsworth:

"Tyrants, strong before,

In wicked pleas, were as strong as demons now;

..... The goaded land waxed mad; the crimes of few

Spread into madness of the many; blasts

From hell came sanctified like airs from heaven."

Especially horrible to Wordsworth were the massacres at the height of the revolution:

"Domestic carnage now filled the whole year

With feast-days; old men from the chimney-nook,

The maiden from the bosom of her love,

 The mother from the cradle of the babe,

The warrior from the field all perished, all

Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,

Head after head, and never heads enough

For those that bade them fall."

And the guillotine was compared to

"A toy that mimics with revolving wings

The motion of a wind-mill."

The poet's antipathy toward Jacobinism rose to such a height that he wrote upon the
downfall of Robespierre and his crew:

"few happier moments have been mine

Than that which told the downfall of this Tribe

So dreaded, so abhorred."

Of course, in a later, recapitulatory book (Book XI), Words-worth did point out rather
emphatically that in the early days of the French Revolution he was "an active partisan",
and even rhapsodically:

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very Heaven!"

He even acknowledged

"That throwing off oppression must be work

As well of License as of Liberty;"

and he even bewailed the fact when

"with open war

Britain opposed the liberties of France."

And he rather attributed his attitude of enmity toward France to thelater wars of
conquest waged by the French army and to Napoleon eventually becoming emperor:

"But now, become oppressors in their turn,

 Frenchmen had changed a war of self-defence

For one of conquest, losing sight of all

Which they had struggled for;"

and then,

"finally to close

And seal up all the gains of France, a Pope

Was called in, to crown an Emperor."

Wordsworth's almost about-face change in his attitude toward the French Revolution
(from Girondism to Jacobinism) is given herein detail, in accordance with the poet's own
record in "The Prelude", in order that we may have a true picture of his world outlook.
Words-worth has not infrequently been regarded as reactionary, just be-cause of his
attacks on Jacobinism. Of course, in this respect he cannot be compared with Byron or
Shelley who endorsed revolutionary activities practically anywhere and at any place, but
if we take into consideration an accepted progressive writer like Dickens, itis all too
obvious that in a novel directly about the French Revolution such as "A Tale of Two
Cities" Dickens too was all for the revolution previous to the storming of the Bastille but
stopped short with a feeling of horror at the scene of the guillotining near the end of the
story. The similarity is here quite striking. What is more, it is important to remember that
here in "The Prelude" Wordsworth did quite repeatedly utter his strong attitude in favour
of the French Revolution not only shortly after the fall of the Bastille but even for quite
some time following the September massacres. Thus, "The Prelude" is a significant
document showing admirably the spiritual crisis within Wordsworth between his youthful
ardour for revolution and his later horrors at large-scale bloodshed and mass struggle.
We must admit that Wordsworth's growing conservatism came with the years and as his
life became more secure from financial worries, but his earlier ideals of republicanism
againsttyranny should also be remembered.

"The Prelude" contains some excellent passages of blank verse, as the numerous bits
of quotations above may well testify, and while some of the lengthy discussions on
imagination and taste and other abstract matters are certainly quite boring, the poem is
nevertheless studded with quite a number of incidental sketches of outlandish figures
and with short episodes of quaint personal reminiscences (e.g. a dismissed soldier back
from the Tropics in Book IV, a semi-Quixote, an Arab in a dream and a boy from the cliff
sand islands of Winander in Book V, the luckless Maid of Butter-mere and her new-born
babe and a Father with his sickly babe and a blind Beggar propped against a wall in
Book VII,) all of which show the poet's outgoing sympathy for the unfortunate, the poor
and the miserable. But, above all else, "The Prelude" is an important poem because it is
a heart-pouring expression of Words-worth's own spiritual development composed in
simple and some-times very intimate verse. As an autobiographical document "The
Prelude" shows very clearly Wordsworth's big though gradual change from a potential
radical, with his infinite sympathies for the poor and the oppressed and his strong urge
for universal freedom from tyranny, to a moralizing conservative, with his mounting
antipathy against any form of revolutionary violence and his growing belief in
"intellectual love" that will bring a "moral world". That this spiritual change was partly
brought about by the material change in his personal financial state is significantly
indicated toward the close of the poem as he in Book XIV, after expressing his gratitude
to his sister Dorothy and fellow-poet Coleridge, devoted twenty-odd lines of his verse to
a special mention of a "bequest" from a man named Calvert who

"By a bequest sufficient for my needs

Enabled me to pause for choice, and walk

At large and unrestrained, nor damped too soon

By mortal cares","He cleared a passage for me, and the stream

Flowed in the bent of nature."

This bequest that made it possible for Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy to settle down
without financial worries in the Lake district in 1797 meant a great deal to Wordsworth
and this is obvious from this special mention in the poem.

"The Prelude" which grew into such a long poem was meant to be an introduction to a
longer and more ambitious work which he at first entitled "The Recluse" and which was
to include three big parts. Actually, aside from a short "Prospectus", only Book I of Part I
("Home at Grasmere") and the whole of Part II ("The Excursion") were completed. The
"Prospectus" is supposed merely to outline the design and scope of the long
philosophical poem and contains numerous "echoes" or phrases borrowed from Milton's
"Paradise Lost". "Home at Grasmere" is merely a record of the poet's and his sister
Dorothy's first settlement at Gras-mere and contains a very rhapsodic account of the
world of wild na-ture there that delighted and inspired them. One significant thing here is
that the poet drew definite distinctions between the men at large and the labouring
populace:

I look for Man

The common creature of the brotherhood,

Differing but little from the Man elsewhere,

 For selfishness and envy and revenge,

Ill neighbourhood - pity that this should be

Flattery and double-dealing, strife and wrong,

Yet is it something gained, it is in truth

A mighty gain, that Labour here preserves

His rosy face, a servant only here

Of the fireside or of the open field;

A Freeman therefore sound and unimpaired.

This thought of elevating the common labouring people, particularly in the countryside,
remained with Wordsworth almost through-out his long life and constituted one of the
saving graces of the conservative poet.

"The Excursion", admittedly the second and completed part of the long poem "The
Recluse", was first published in 1814, and contained nine books. The chief figure here is
the Wanderer, a philosophical Pedlar, who goes first to visit his friend the pessimistic
Solitary (or Recluse) and tries to talk him out of his despondency, then the two meet the
Pastor and conversations are carried on about the Church and about the graves, and
then are further introduced another clergyman and a Youthful peasant, and finally are
discussed the manufacturing spirit in the country and its effect upon the humbler
classes of society as well as the system of nation-al education and the Christian
religion. Interspersed in the long poem are pictures of the unfortunate people in the
cities and in the countryside, and also the recurrent iterations of two themes mentioned
in other poems, the poet's disappointment at the French Revolution (in Books IiI and IV)
and at the Industrial Revolution (in Book VIII) and his belief that the children are more
blessed because they are nearer to God. But pervading the entire poem is the moral
tone conveyed in the earlier books by the Wanderer and in the later books by the
Pastor, as the poet obviously tries to correct the feeling of despondency dominant in the
Solitary and to exhort the reading public to cultivate moral virtue and faith in religion. Al-
though at the beginning of this poem Nature still plays its important role in overcoming
despondency, yet toward the end of the piece the poet seems to turn more definitely to
orthodox Christianity for the first time. The very exhortative nature of the poem and the
tame, prosaic tone even in the few descriptive passages therein make the whole piece
very dull and long-winded, and justify essentially Byron's cynical attacks on the poem as

"a sample from the vasty version

Of his new system to perplex the sages." Another longer poem (written 1798, published
1819) in which Wordsworth indulges in his rather ridiculous moralizing’s is "Peter Bell in
which the hopelessly dissolute Peter is thoroughly movedby a decrepit Ass who until he
is brought back to his wife and children would not desert his dying master and the
wicked man is miraculously reformed in the end. Such a sentimental tale told in a mock-
heroic way truly deserves to be parodied by Shelley in "Peter Bell the Third".

Wordsworth's early tragedy in blank verse (written 1795-96),"The Borderers", was

supposedly about a group of outlaws on the English-Scottish Border, but actually it has
nothing to do with their outlawry but deals chiefly with a villain who treacherously makes
the leader of the Borderers commit a heinous crime, and without any sound motivation.
The verse is also rather tame and doesn't rise to flights of poetry.

Wordsworth's poems written after 1814 have generally been over-looked by scholars
and critics as much inferior to his earlier poems. There were several series of poems on
different tours he took to different places: two "Memorials of a Tour in Scotland" (one
in1803 and one in 1814), "Memorials of a Tour to the Continent"(1820), "Memorials of a
Tour in Italy" (1837), "The River Duddon"(1820), "Poems Composed or Suggested
During a Tour in the Summer of 1833" (1835) and "Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems"
(1835). Most of these poems were written as occasional pieces when the poet visited
some scenic spots or places of historical interest, very much in the same spirit of the
numerous old Chinese poems also written on specific occasions by poets in the Tang
and the Sung Dynasties, usually either expressing admiration or appreciation of the
beautiful scenery or bewailing the brevity of human existence in connection with
meditative thoughts on certain historical figures and events. The most outstanding of all
these is certainly "The Solitary Reaper". Though the experience of seeing the reaper
was not Wordsworth's own and was acknowledged by the poet to be suggested by a
passage in his friend Thom-as Wilkinson's "Tour of Scotland" (not published till 1824),
yet the short lyric is an admirable paean of a simple peasant maiden who obviously
enjoys her labour and whose plaintive song leaves strong and lasting impressions upon
the chance listener. Especially effective is the poet's stretch of his imagination to make
up for his ignorance of the girl's Gaelic words in the song:

"Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles of long ago:

Or is it some more humble lay,

Familiar matter of today?

 Some natural loss, or pain,

That has been, and may be again?”

The very fact that this poem was not the result of the poet's own eye-witness account
but rather that of his imagination speaks more loudly than otherwise of Wordsworth's
true sympathy and admiration for the simple labouring peasant folk, and the use of
simple words in beautiful lyricism adds to the charm of this short poem.

Another big group of Wordsworth's later poetry consists in his series of "Ecclesiastical
Sonnets" divided into three parts and totaling 140 sonnets in all. Here the poet tried to
trace the development of the English church from its beginnings to the author's time
("Part 1 From the Introduction of Christianity into Britain, to the Consummation of the
Papal Dominion"; "Part II-To the Close of the Troubles in the Reign of Charles I", and
"Part III From the Restoration to the Present Times"), and dealt according to chronology
with the churchmen and kings as well as with religious events and rituals, in his leisurely
though usually devout way. Except for one or two these sonnets prove to be pedestrian
and dull and have not stood the test of time. "Mutability"(the 34th, sonnet in Part III),
possibly the most striking of the whole lot, leaves off the usual description or comment
on any particular person or event to make a general remark on the mutability of
everything, speculating on the effect of the rise and fall of the church chime upon those
meddling with crime or avarice or over-anxious care and deploring the melting away
even of the outward forms of truth by "the unimaginable touch of time". One other
sonnet of the group that is remembered today is entitled "Inside of King's College
Chapel, Cambridge" (the 43rd sonnet of Part III) that begins with the line "tax not the
royal Saint with vain expense", and sings the praise of the wonderful architecture of this
chapel. Wordsworth wrote many sonnets in exuberant language but these on the
English Church do not rank as high as his earlier sonnets on the theme of political
liberty.

Wordsworth wrote a number of poems in eulogy of the English aristocracy and following
his acceptance of poet-laureateship he praised directly the royal family. These include,
among others, his poems on his patron the Earl of Lonsdale and on the Countess of
Lonsdale, his poem "On a Portrait of the Duke of Wellington upon the Field of Waterloo,
by Haydon", his sonnet "On the Death of His Majesty George the Third", and his "Ode
on the Installation of His Royal Highness Prince Albert as Chancellor of the University of
Cambridge, July, 1847", which last poem ends with a line of open eulogy of the reigning
queen, "The Pride of the Islands, Victoria the Queen." These poems have been
considered an irrefutable and indelible evidence of Wordsworth's servitude to the British
ruling class, and this, plus his strong censure of Jacobinism in the French Revolution
and his idle life of a Tory gentle-man and a recipient of a government sinecure, has
brought him the ill repute of a reactionary poet of romanticism, in opposition to the
progressive camp of Byron and Shelley who showered their vituperative attacks and
ridicule upon him and his fellow "Lake Poets" Coleridge and Southey.

Wordsworth had his own theory of poetry. When he and Coleridge published their joint
collection of poems in 1798, he wrote a brief "advertisement" in which the young poet
tried to instruct his readers to revise their fixed standards of judgment on how to find
pleasure in poetry. He explains that the majority of his poems were "experiments" in
order to "ascertain how far the language of conversation in the lower and middle classes
of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure" and he spoke stronglyagainst
"the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers". Here we may already
see Wordsworth's objections to what he later called the "poetic diction" of a number of
his predecessors in the Neo-Classical tradition. In 1800 when a second edition was
called for of "The Lyrical Ballads", Wordsworth wrote a much longer "Preface" which has
since become very well-known as a piece of literary criticism and which was slightly
expanded in the 1802 edition of the poems. Here Wordsworth uttered his views on what
poetry should be in much more definite terms:

"The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself

in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from

common life and to relate or describe them, throughout,

as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used

by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a cer-

tain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things.

should be presented to the mind in an unusual way; and,

further, and above all, to make these incidents and

situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not

ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as

far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in

a state of excitement."

In other words, four points were essential to poetry according to Wordsworth:

(1) the theme is to be incidents and situations chosen from common life (generally "low
and rustic life" as he added in the following sentence),
(2) the language used is to be a selection of language really used by men (i.e., against
"poetic diction"),

(3) regarding the treatment of the theme, ordinary things are to be presented in an
unusual way ("to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination"), and

(4) the poet is to trace in the chosen incidents and situations the primary laws of human
nature (probably meaning the finding of universal significance in human society).

There can be no question that to choose incidents and situations from common life
(from "low and rustic life") and to use language really used by men are or can be
admirable objectives for poetry, as in actual practice Wordsworth's poems about the
poor and the wretched people in the English countryside and his natural, un-adorned
language as an antidote to "personifications of abstract ideas" are important points in
his favour, though it must also be pointed out that some of his poems on "low and rustic
life" reveal his yearning for patriarchalism (e.g., "Michael") or his sentimentalizing over
the power of a miserable ass in reforming a wild ruffian (e.g., "Peter Bell"). As regards
the presentation of ordinary things in an unusual way, that seems to account for the
exaggeration of the circumstances in which Wordsworth placed the persons described
(e.g., the Leech-gatherer in "Resolution and Independence", "The Old Cumberland
Beggar", "We Are Seven", "The Last of the Flock", "The Idiot Boy", etc.), and such
exaggerate on usually subtracts from rather than adds to the realistic appeal of the
poems. As for the poet's attempts to trace the primary laws of human nature in his
chosen incidents and situations, they not infrequently result in the demonstration of the
author's own views of feudal or bourgeois morality such as fortitude, meekness, forgive-
ness and other Christian "virtues" that actually preach submission and forbearance to
evil and to oppression instead of suggesting righteous struggle against malevolent
forces. So these theoretical tenets of Wordsworth's on poetry contain both merits and
shortcomings, particularly when they are viewed together with his poems that obviously
illustrate them.

In the long "Preface" to "The Lyrical Ballads" two other things are of special interest.
Here are given a number of the poet's well-known dictums which have since been
regarded as pronouncements of much profundity. For instance, he says in one place,
"For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," then he adds, "it
takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." He stresses the purposefulness
of his poems in the collection: "each of them has a worthy purpose"; but heal so thinks it
necessary for poetry to produce pleasure: "The end of poetry is to produce excitement
in co-existence with an over balance of pleasure." He speaks often of the dignified
vocation of a poet. In answer to his own question of "What is a poet?" he points out: "He
is a man speaking to men; a man ... endowed with more lively sensibility, more
enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a
more comprehensive soul...." Elsewhere he also exalts poetry as "the image of man and
nature", as "the first and last of all knowledge." Wordsworth also touches frequently on
the language of his poetry, on the distinction between prose and verse. On the one
hand he repeatedly denies the use of "personifications of abstract ideas" and "what is
usually called poetic diction" in his poems, as he declares again and again that his
"purpose was to imitate, and, as far as possible, to adopt the very language of men",
and defends himself against the charge of "prosaisms", yet on the other hand he speaks
of the necessary appearance of "dignified and variegated" language:

"for, if the poet's subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion,
lead him to passions, the language of which, if selected truly and judiciously, must
necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alive with metaphors and figures."

He also adds somewhere else, "a very small part of the pleasure given by poetry
depends upon the metre", while he warns against the argument that metre should "be
accompanied with the other artificial distinctions of style". These remarks on the
language of poetry, on its "nakedness and simplicity", and against the use of artificial
devices in style to accompany the metre in verse, are obviously sound guides to the
writing of poetry and were service able at the turn of the century in combating the
unhealthy influence of certain poets of the Neo-classical tradition.

Yet another thing to be noted is the mention, in the expanded "Preface" to the third
edition of "The Lyrical Ballads" in 1802, of Coleridge's contribution to the collection.
Here he speaks of"The Ancient Mariner" and other poems as having "in a great
measure" "the same tendency as my own", because "our opinions on the subject of
poetry do almost entirely coincide." This reference to the cooperative efforts of the two
poets in "The Lyrical Ballads" is not quite the same as given by Coleridge in his "Bio-
graphia Literaria" (to be discussed later) in which the younger poet speaks of their
agreement to a division of labour in their different contributions to the collection of "The
Lyrical Ballads".

In the Western world Wordsworth has been considered a great English poet with
considerable influence upon many English and American poets since his time. Matthew
Arnold in late 19th century even regarded Wordsworth as a poet only next to
Shakespeare and Milton in importance in English literary history. But Wordsworth was
attacked ruthlessly by Byron and was ridiculed by Shelley (whose "Peter Bell the Third"
was quite unmistakably a parody of "Peter Bell"), and his poems written in praise of the
royal family and of lords and generals of the time like the Duke of Wellington and Lord
Lonsdale, plus his acceptance of poet laureateship after the death of Southey and his
associations with the latter, have brought him the defamatory appellation of a poet of
"reactionary romanticism". An overall appraisal of Wordsworth as a poet and of his
poetry is therefore necessary.
Wordsworth was born and brought up in the last thirty years of the 18th century when
England after her two bourgeois revolutions of 1640 and 1688 had settled down to a
state of compromise between the feudal aristocracy (and the new landed aristocracy
created after 1688) and the growing bourgeoisie, when the new ideas of the
Enlightenment and the new developments of the Industrial Revolution and the French
Revolution of 1789 exerted their lasting impressions and their strong influence upon the
lives and minds of the English people as a whole. Like many other Englishmen of
middle class origin of his time, Wordsworth in his youth was not quite satisfied with the
political and social status quo in England and during his early visit to France he was
much impressed by the severe political oppression there and by the views of political
freedom and social equality of the Enlightenment, and so he showed much enthusiasm
for the early revolutionary activities in France in the years 1789-92 and was even ready
to overlook what he witnessed of bloodshed and violence and to join the revolutionary
ranks there (this may be found recorded in "The Prelude"). Then his personal finances
made it imperative for him to return to England, and gradually he was horrified by the
subsequent reports of the Jacobin dictatorship with its increased violence and by the
English propaganda against French invasions of Switzerland and Venice and against
Napoleon's absolute military rule that seemed to threaten even the independence of
Britain. So he turned against France and the French revolution (also recorded in "The
Prelude").In the meantime, after suffering from poverty for quite some time, Wordsworth
began to receive legacies, first from a certain Calvert and then from Lord Lonsdale, that
brought him and his sister Dorothy financial security and enabled them to settle down in
their favourite Lake district and to a life of ease and devotion to poetry. The end to his
economic worries naturally led to his conservatism in politics. Then his poetic fame
began to rise rapidly, and as the sage at Rydal Mount in the last years of his life he
became more wealthy and famous but had hardly any more contributions of importance
to poetry.

The above picture of his personal career very naturally ac-counts for the division of his
poetic output into two different periods: (1) from the last years of the 18th century up to
1805, and (2) from1805 to 1850. His poems of real importance and value were al-most
all written before 1805, while his later poems were mostly in-significant. Many of his
early poems show the young poet's great sympathy for the poor and the unfortunate
chiefly in the country-side, in the Lake district where he spent many years and got to
know numerous people in out-of-the-way places. Also he wrote a number of poems,
including quite a few sonnets, either lamenting the loss of freedom in certain countries
in Continental Europe or show-ing his admiration for the people struggling bravely for
their national or personal freedom. These are certainly the best poems by Wordsworth
and in spite of certain minor flaws here and there deserve our praise of their progressive
significance. Next to these are his poems on nature, including those on birds and
animals and plants, in which he showed his joy in natural phenomena and compared
the simple natural world with the vicious human society particularly in the big cities
under capitalism. In these poems, however, the poet sometimes failed to understand
the true nature of the industrial revolution and in blaming the evils of capitalist
oppression and exploitation he turned to the old patriarchal society as more desirable.
Among his early poems he already fell somewhat under the influence of the Christian
religion and also the neo-Platonic theory of man's prenatal existence as being nearer to
God (e.g. "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood"). "The
Prelude", the greater part of which was completed before 1805, was one of the last
poems of his early period. In his later poems, he produced occasionally some poems
that matched well with his better pieces of the early period, such as "The Solitary
Reaper", "I wandered lonely as a cloud", "Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary
Splendour and Beauty", etc., but they were few. Most of the later poems are occasional
poems on his trips to different places (to Scotland and to the European Continent), his
religious poems in his "Ecclesiastical Sketches", and "The Excursion" which is the
longest completed part of his planned "master-piece" "The Recluse". In these poems
Wordsworth turned to religious mysticism or abstruse moral and philosophical
speculations which have long been regarded as of little worth by the general reading
public whether in England or in other English-speaking countries.

Except in his early youth, Wordsworth remained almost always a conservatism,

politically as well as in his attitude toward social changes particularly as he bewailed the
passing of the patriarchal days in the English countryside in many of his better known
poems like "Michael", "Resolution and Independence", "Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman".
"The Old Cumberland Beggar", "The Last of the Flock", etc. Though ever since his early
middle age he depended upon legacies and sinecures for his livelihood, yet he
invariably showed his fellow-feeling for his neighboring poor and simple people, with
overflow-ing sympathy for their sufferings and tribulations, and there was never any
note of condescension or contempt for their ignorance and their uncouth appearances.
Of course this was due partly to his fervid belief in Christian humility and benevolence
and partly due to his straitened family circumstances all through his boyhood and youth,
yet this consistent demonstration of his cordiality and intimacy toward the simple
countryfolk in so many of his poems speaks loudly for him as a poet of the suffering
multitude. This must not be forgotten in our overall estimate of Wordsworth as a poet,
though it must also be admitted that this fellow-feeling for the common people dwindled
with age, with his increasing fame and affluence, as the practical disappearance of
poems on the rustic people in the poet's old age can well testify.

But Wordsworth did not work steadfastly for the ruling class, beyond writing occasional
verses in praise of the royalty and nobility of England. He spoke against the Jacobin
Dictatorship, but the condemnation included the aggressions and absolutism of
Napoleon that followed immediately the brief Jacobin regime, and then of course we
must also take into account the British propaganda at the time against the French
invasions of many weak and small countries on the European Continent and against
Napoleon's threat to strike at England so that the poet's strong sentiments against the
later stages of the French Revolution may be partly the result of his patriotism. Of
course, Wordsworth was unable to detect the reactionary nature of the Holy Alliance as
could Byron, and so he applauded Britain's alliance with Russia and Austria and Prussia
in their war against France and eulogized the Duke of Wellington very highly (Byron did
the opposite). This may be attributed to the poet's conservatism, but it can also be
explained by his growing approval in his later years of the political and social status quo
in Britain and in the Continent of Europe and therefore he almost unwittingly sided with
the ruling classes of the time. In these respect she cannot be compared with Byron or
Shelley who spoke openly against the ruling classes and in favour of the common
people and their revolutionary activities. However, the numerous attacks made by Byron
upon the Lake Poets were not entirely the result of their opposite or different political
views; they were partly due to Byron's personal animosity first of all against Robert
Southey the reigning poet laureate and then also due to his low estimate of Words-
worth's poetry, especially the long poem "The Excursion". Shelley's antagonism toward
Wordsworth was chiefly in his writing of "Peter Bell the Third" to ridicule the older poet's
"Peter Bell". While we ought to be able to see the two different camps of poetry as
represented by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey on the one hand and by Byron and
Shelley on the other and to consider the former group as writers of conservatism and
the latter as poets of progressive inclinations, it would be going a bit too far to dub the
Lake Poets as reactionary or counter-revolutionary and to call Byron and Shelley
revolutionary poets.

Wordsworth was an important poet also in the sense that he reacted against the
stagnant poetic diction of neo-classicism of the18th century and started the new
tradition of romanticism by glorifying the world of nature and by the use of the simple
language of the common people. Some of his poems are known for their delightful
lyricist a (such as "The Solitary Reaper", "I wandered lonely as a cloud", Lucy poems,
"The Sparrow's Nest", "Lines Written in Early Spring", etc.). He perhaps wrote more
sonnets than any other important poet in English literary history; some of his sonnets
are among the best known in the English language (e.g., "It is a beauteous evening,
calm and free", "The world is too much with us; late and soon", "Composed upon
Westminster Bridge"), especially a few on political liberty: "I grieved for Bonaparte,"
"Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee", "Tous-saint, the most unhappy man of
men", "Milton! Thou should be living at this hour", "Great men have been among us;
hands that penned", and "It is not to be thought of that the flood". Wordsworth also
could wield the blank verse very effectively, as in "Tintern Abbey", though the blank
verse in "The Prelude" is rather uneven, with some very lofty passages but also a great
number of prosaic and flat lines. The blank verse in "The Excursion" is most ineffective,
and renders the dull, longwinded poems more monotonous and less interesting. In the
heyday of Victorian morality Wordsworth was naturally very highly praised for his mora
land philosophical speculations in his later poetry, but in the 20thcentury his fame rests
chiefly upon his early poems on liberty, on simple rustic life in the countryside, and on
nature.

Wordsworth was first introduced to China in the early decades of the present century,
particularly after the beginning of the May Fourth Movement in 1919. Since the 1950s
his fame has been eclipsed by that of Byron and Shelley. He has been criticized very
severely by some as a loyal servant of the British ruling class. But at least there is
greatness in some of his early poetry and as a founder of the new tradition of
romanticism to replace the neoclassicism gone stale of the 18th century, he deserves to
be remembered for his contributions to the development of English poetry in early 19th
century.

His Theory of Poetry

(In the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads (1800) Wordsworth set out
his theory of poetry. It reveals a lofty conception of the Dignity of that art which is "the
breath and finer spirit of all knowledge,'') and which is the product of "the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings," taking its, origin from "Emotion recollected in tranquility."
The qualifications of the poet are on a level with the dignity of his art. To Wordsworth,
he is a man "possessed of more than usual organic sensibility," and one who has also
"thought long and deeply." How far this view differs from that of poetry as a graceful
social accomplishment is quite obvious: it partly explains Wordsworth's sense of his own
importance. Apart from these general views on the poet and his art, Wordsworthian
dogma can be divided into two portions concerning:

(a) the subject and

(b) the style of poetry.

(a) (Regarding subject, Wordsworth declares his preference for "incidents and situations
from common life,'') to obtain such situations, “humble and rustic life was generally
chosen, because in that condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in
which they can attain their maturity." Over these incidents Wordsworth proposes to
throw "a certain coloring of the imagination whereby ordinary things should be
presented to the mind in an unusual aspect."
(b)(Word5worth's views on poetical style are the most revolutionary of all the ideas in
this preface) Discarding the “gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern
writers,"(he insists that his poems contain little poetic diction, and are written in "a
selection of the real language of men) in a state of vivid sensation." His views on poetic
diction he summed up with these words: "there neither is nor can be any essential
difference between the language of prose and metrical composition."
The extent to which Wordsworth's own practice as a poet justified his theories is a
question which has long occupied the attention of critics. In the realm of subject matter
he remained staunch to his declared opinions, for the majority of his poems deal with
humble and rustic life. That he was aware of the dangers inherent in his theory he
makes clear in these words: "in some instances, feelings, even of the ludicrous, may
have been given to my readers by expressions which appeared to me tender and
pathetic." It is in this way that he sometimes fails.

Generally, though, when Wordsworth writes under a strong emotional stimulus, his style
is free from banality and prosaisms. It is touchingly simple in some of his Lucy poems,
gay and joyous in other lyrics, and vigorous, with something of a Miltonic sweep and
resonance, in his greatest sonnets and blank verse. In truth though in his best blank
verse it is fired by the passion of his imaginative insight to grandeur above ordinary
speech, it does not stray very far from the selection of the real language of men which
he advocated. At other times, however, when the emotional stimulus is small or entirely
lacking, he writes with his theories in the forefront of his mind, and the result is the
prosaic banality of some sections of Simon Lee.

Features of his Poetry

(a) Its Inequality and its Limitations.

All the critics of Wordsworth are at pains to point out the mass of inferior work that came
from his pen. Matthew Arnold, one of the acutest of the poet's admirers, closes the
record of Wordsworth s best work with the year 1808 even before the completion of The
Excursion. This poem is long, meditative, and often prosaic, and these tendencies
become more marked as the years pass. Before the year 1808 he had produced poems
as intensely and artistically beautiful as any in the language. It was hard, however, for
Wordsworth to appreciate his limitations, which were many and serious. He had little
sense of humor, a scanty dramatic power, and only a meagre narrative gift.) But he
strove to exploit all these qualities in his work. His one drama, The Borderers, was only
a partial success, and his narrative poems, like Ruth and The White Doe of Rylstone,
are not among the best of his work.

(b) Its Egoism.

In a person of lesser caliber such a degree of self-esteem as Wordsworth's would have
been ridiculous; in his case, with the undoubted genius that was in the man, it was
something almost heroic. Domestic circumstances--the adoration of his wife and sister
and the cloistral seclusion of the life he led--confirmed him in the habit of taking himself
too seriously. The best of his shorter poems deal with his own experiences; and his
longest works, The Prelude and The Excursion, describe his spiritual development in
the most minute detail.

(c) lyrical gift

In spite of this self-obsession he is curiously deficient in the purely lyrical gift. He cannot
bare his bosom, as Burns does; he cannot leap into the ether like Shelley. Yet he
excels, especially in the face of nature, in the expression of a reflective and analytic
mood which is both personal and general. The following lyric illustrates this mood to
perfection:

My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Sometimes he does touch on intimate emotions, but then he tends to be restrained,
hinting at rather than proclaiming the passions that he feels. The series of Lucy
poemsare typical of their kind:
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!
Such a lyrical gift, reflective rather than passionate, finds a congenial mode of
expression in the sonnet, the most complicated and expository of the lyrical forms. In his
sonnets his lyrical mood burns clear and strong, and as a result they rank among the
best in English poetry. Wordsworth's use of the Petrarchan form was so striking that he
re-established its supremacy over the Shakespearian sonnet, which had eclipsed it in
popularity during the last great age of sonneteering the Elizabethan. The influence of
Milton is clearly felt, and the sonnets have strength, flexibility, and, in many cases, a
controlled intensity of feeling. Some of them are patriotic, others express his passion for
liberty, and yet others, such as the famous one composed on Westminster Bridge, deal
with nature All show clearly the beneficial influence on Wordsworth of the restrictions of
the sonnet form, whose fourteen lines curbed his tendency toward prolixity.

(d) His Treatment of Nature.

His dealings with nature are his chief glory as a poet.

(1) His treatment is accurate and first-hand. As he explained, he wrote with his
eye "steadily fixed on the object." Even the slightest of his poems have evidence
of close observation:
The cattle are grazing,
Their heads never raising;
There are forty feeding like one.
The most polished of his poems have the same stamp, as can be seen in
Resolution and Independence. "The image of the hare," he says with reference
to this poem, quoted below. "I then observed on the ridge of the Fell."
There was a roaring in the wind all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising calm and bright;
The birds are singing in the distant woods;
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;
The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;
And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.
All things that' Iove the sun are out of doors;
The sky rejoices in the morning's birth;
The grass is bright with rain-drops;--on the moors
The hare is running races in her mirth;
And with her feet she from the plashy earth
Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun,
Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.

(2)This personal dealing with nature in all her moods produces a joy, a
plenteousness of delight, that to most readers is Wordsworth's most appealing charm.
Before the beauty of nature he is never paltry; he is nearly always adequate; and that is
perhaps the highest achievement that he ever desired. The extracts just quoted are
outstanding examples of this aspect of his poetry.

(3) In his treatment of nature, however, he is not content merely to rejoice: he

tries to see more deeply and to find the secret springs of this joy and thanksgiving. He
says:
To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for
tears. He strives to capture and embody in words such deep-seated emotions, but,
almost of necessity, from the very nature of the case, with little success. He gropes in
the shadows, and comes away with empty hands.
He cannot solve the riddle of those obstinate questionings.

Of sense and outward things,

Fallings from us, vanishings.

Yet, with a remarkable fusion of sustained thought and of poetic imagination, he does
convey the idea of "the Being that is in the clouds and air," the soul that penetrates all
things, the spirit, the mystical essence, the divine knowledge that, as far as he was
concerned, lies behind all nature. Lastly, in one of the most exalted poetical efforts in
any language, he puts into words the idea of the continuity of life that runs through all
existence:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Ode: Intimations of Immortality

(4) This deeper insight underlying Wordsworth's treatment of nature"

distinguishes him from many lesser poets. Though he is no inconsiderable landscape
painter, as the opening lines of Tintern Abbey will show, he is seldom content to draw
beautiful scenes for their own sake. He looks on nature to hear "the still, sad music of
humanity," and his portrayal of man seen against a background of nature gives rise to
some of his best known poems, such as The Solitary Reaper, Resolution and
Independence, and Michael. "These figures have something of the strength, dignity, and
austerity of their settings., Even more striking are the poems such as Tintern Abbey,
Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, and some parts of The Prelude, which trace the
development of his own relations with nature, from his boyish days with their "glad
animal movements," through his youth, when natural beauty had no need of a remoter
charm By thought supplied, nor any interest Un borrowed from the eye. . . to his
maturity, of which he wrote,
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

(e) In style Wordsworth presents a remarkable contrast, for he ranges from the sublime
(as in the extract last quoted) to the ridiculous:
In the sweet shire of Cardigan,
Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall,
An old Man dwells, a little man,--
'Tis said he once was tall.
Full five-and-thirty years he lived
A running huntsman merry;
And still the centre of his cheek
Is red as a ripe cherry.
Simon Lee
This verse illustrates the lower ranges of his style, when he is hagridden with his
theories of poetic diction. The first two lines are mediocre; the second pair is absurd;
and the rest of the verse is middling. This is simplicity overdone; yet it is always to be
remembered that at his best Wordsworth can unite simplicity with sublimity, as he does
in the lyrics we have already quoted. He has a kind of middle style; at its best it has
grace and dignity, a heart-searching simplicity, and a certain magical enlightenment of
phrase that is all his own. Not Shakespeare himself can better Wordsworth when the
latter is in a mood that produces a poem like the following:
" She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn,
Or up the mountain springs;
 And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm,
Of mute insensate things.
"The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the Storm
Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form
By silent sympathy.
"The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."
Three Years she grew in Sun and Shower

Qamar2977@gmail.com
Contact me for more notes