Wordsworth theory of poetry | William wordsworth | wordsworth as a nature poet | Wordsworth

 

Wordsworth theory of poetry -william wordsworth

William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Young William's parents, John and Ann, died during his boyhood. Raised amid the mountains of Cumberland alongside the River Derwent, Wordsworth grew up in a rustic society, and spent a great deal of his time playing outdoors, in what he would later remember as a pure communion with nature. In the early- 1790s, William lived for a time in France, then in the grip of the violent Revolution; Wordsworth's philosophical sympathies lay with the revolutionaries, but his loyalties lay with England, whose monarchy he was 1ot prepared to see overthrown.wordsworth is known as a nature poet.  While in France, Wordsworth had a log affair with Annette Vallon, with whom he had a daughter, Caroline. A later journey to France to meet Caroline, now a young girl, would inspire the great sonnet - "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free".  wordsworth definition of poetry is very simple. The chaos and bloodshed of the Reign of Terror in Paris drove William to philosophy books; he was deeply troubled by the rationalism he found in the works of thinkers such as William Godwin, which clashed with his own softer, more emotional understanding of the world. wordsworth wrote a lot of poems on nature. 

  In despair, he gave up his pursuit of moral questions. In the mid-1790s, however, Wordsworth's increasing sense of anguish forced him to formulate his own understanding of the world and of the human mind in more concrete terms. The theory he produced, and the poetics he invented to embody it, caused a revolution in English literature. Developed throughout his life, Wordsworth's understanding of the human mind seems simple enough today, what with the advent of psychoanalysis and the general Freudian acceptance of the importance of childhood in the adult psyche. But in Wordsworth's time, in what Seamus Heaney has called "Dr. Johnson's supremely adult eighteenth century", it was shockingly unlike anything that had been proposed before.    Wordsworth believed (as he expressed in poems such as the "Intimations of Immortality" Ode) that, upon being born, human beings move from a perfect, idealised realm into the imperfect, un-ideal earth. As children, some memory of the former purity and glory in which they lived remains, best perceived in the solemn and joyous relationship of the child to the beauties of nature. But as children grow older, the memory fades, and the magic of nature dies. Still, the memory of childhood can offer an important solace, which brings with it almost a kind of re-access to the lost purities of the past. And the maturing mind develops the capability to understand nature in human terms, and to see in it metaphors for human life, which compensate for the loss of ihe direct connection. Freed from financial worries by a legacy left to him in 1795, Wordsworth moved with his sister Dorothy to Racedown Lodge, and then to Alfoxden in Grasmere, where Wordsworth could be closer to his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge began work on a book called Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798 and reissued with Wordsworth's monumenta' preface in 1802. Following the success of Lyrical Ballads and his subsequent poem The Prelude, a massive autobiography in verse form, Wordsworth moved to the stately house at Rydal Mount where he lived, with Dorothy, his wife Mary, and his children, until his death in 1850.

 Wordsworth became the dominant force in English poetry while still quite a young man, and he lived to be quite old; his later years were marked by an increasing aristocratic te.perament and a general alienation from the younger Romantics whose work he had inspired. Byron-the only important poet to become more popular than Wordsworth during Wordsworth's lifetime-in particular sa v him as a kind of sell-out, writing in his sardonic preface to Don Juan that the once-liberal Wordsworth had "turnei out a Tory" at last. The last decades of Wordsworth's life, however, were spent as Poet Laureate of England, and until his death, he was widely considered as the most important author in England. Characteristics of his Poetry Every critic of English poetry has come to the conclusion that Wordsworth is the greatest Nature poet of England. Indeed, reading his poetry, we are moved deeply and experience a kind of calm pleasure. To him, like the mystics, Nature was not a mere physical entity or loveliness or a sensuous presentation and description, but revelation of the Supreme Being; a vision, an interpretation, a path to pereeption of the unseen and infinite as both the poems here selected show. To him, the myriad forms and phenomena in the universe were the manifestations of the divine-to him God in Man and in Nature is one as the super-sensuous world appeared to be more real than the world of sense-perception. One cardinal principle of his poetry is his love for human beings- to love Nature is to love Man who is part and parcel of Nature. A distinguishing feature of this belief in Man is his glorification of childhood, of which the 'Intimations of Immortality' is the supreme example. Another characteristic of his poetry is that Nature is a great teacher, healer and soother. In the "Tables Turned' he says: "One impülse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man3B Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can."

But to learn lessons from Nature one must "bring with a heart That watches and receives. His attitude to Nature did not become mystical and spiritual all at once. There were three stages in this development and they ar described very vividly

in the "Tintern Abbey' and the 'Immortality Ode In the first stage, his love of Nature was like that of child-sheer animal delight in the freshness and beauty of natural objects. This, in the second stage, developed into an impassioned love and sensuous beauty of Nature. In the third stage these passions, joys and raptures of youth yielded place to a quieter and more sober approach in which he became aware of the spiritual and human significance of Nature. He realised that Nature was the abode of God, and that there was an indissoluble bond between Nature, Man and God. This realisation filled him with universal love and faith that all God's creation is full of His blessings. Theory of Poetry Wordsworth elaborated his theory of poetry in his Preface to The Lyrical Ballads. He writes: "I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from er1otion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." But adds: "Though this be true, poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, has also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feelings are modified and directed by our thought, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings." In his view, sensibility alone was not sufficient to ensure good poetry; it mus h directed by "thought long and deep", i.e. by a calm mind. (901-20 What Wordsworth implies is, to quote Herbert Read, that "good poetry is never an immediate reaction to the provoking cause; that our sensations must be allowed time to sink back into the common fund of our experiences, there to find their level and due proportion. That level is found for them by the mind in the act of contemplation, and then in the process of contemplation the sensation revive, and out of the union of contemplating mind and the receiving sensibility, rises that unique mode of expression which we call poetry." This is what Wordsworth means when he asserts that poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity"-a product which provides 'pleasure' and 'delight', the purpose being 'instruction through pleasure'. Wordsworth's theory of poetry is rooted in his ideas of a poet as a 'man speaking to men' who reveals to his fellow beings the hidden unity of their experiences. The poet thinks and feels in the spirit of the passions of people and therefore his language is very akin to theirs. He writes in The Lyrical Ballads: "Low rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated.... The language too of these men is adopted..because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived...." Wordsworth in this way discarded the abstract and frigid style of the 18th century poetry in order to find a suitable language for the new poetic movement.