Index

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Introduction

Wordsworth, William (1770-1850) - English poet who, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was

an early leader of English Romanticism. He is best known for his worship of nature and his

humanitarianism.It is a well known fact that William Wordsworth is rightly considered the

greatest poet of the countryside and of the life of nature in its physical as well as spiritual

aspects. Poets earlier to Wordsworth, like Burns, Cowper, Crabbe and Goldsmith had

exhibited a fine appreciation for the beauties of nature. They were adorers of natures

external charms without having any mystical and philosophical approach to its inner life

and spiritual message. It was left to Wordsworth to reveal the inner soul of nature in his

poems. Actually he is the high priest of nature. His delight in nature was not confined like the

pre romantic poets but he went a step higher. He was concerned for less with the sensuous

manifestations that delight most of our nature poets than with the spiritual that he finds

underlying these manifestations. His contribution to the poetry of nature does not lie in the fact

that he could give accurate and closely observed pictures of nature rich and minute in detail but

in the fact that he elevated nature to heights of spiritual glory and made it a better teacher.
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William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

LIFE
William Wordsworth was born at Cocker mouth, Cumberland, on April 7, 1770, and was

educated at Hawks head Grammar School and at Cambridge. In the summer vacation of 1790

he made a pedestrian tour through France and Switzerland, and in November 1791 returned to

France to study, spending nearly a year at Orleans and Blois. He was now an ardent supporter of

the Revolution, and was deterred only by the interference of friends at home from joining the

Girondins and probably sharing their fate. Returning to England he published (1793) An Evening

Walk, dealing with the landscape round Hawkshead and Ambleside, and Descriptive Sketches,

the materials of which were furnished by his Continental travels. Both these poems are in classic

couplet and in the current poetic style, though the large amount of specific detail in the

descriptions separates them from the common run of 18th -century landscape verse. Meanwhile

the course of events in France alienated his sympathies, and the rise of Napoleon completed the

overthrow of his revolutionary faith. A legacy of 900 pounds (1795) made him independent, and

he resolved to devote himself entirely to literature. He went to live at Alfoxden in Somerset, and

there formed a close friendship with Co9leridge, with whom he published a volume of verse,

Lyrical Ballads, in 1798. After a winter in Germany (1798-9), he settled in the Lake district, first

at Grasmere, then at Allan Bank, and finally (1813) at Rydal Mount. He had married Mary

Hutchinson in 1802. For many years he continued to write and publish poetry, though the public

was indifferent and the critics were contemptuous. Little by little, however, opinion began to

change in his favor. The universities of Durham and Oxford honored him with degrees, his name

was placed on the Civil Pension list, in 1843 he succeeded Southey as poet laureate. He died

March 23, 1850.

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CHARACTER

Wordsworth was a man of austere temper, self-centered, a little stiff and hard, a little too

conscious of his genius and his mission, and not rich in the saving grace of humor. His extreme

preoccupation with himself and his own work, and his want of varied contact with men in the

broad highways of public life narrowed his outlook. While his solitary habits, his long contempt

of the critics, and the adulation of a few worshippers combined to make him kore and more self-

centered. Yet this isolation was itself part of his greatness. He remained to the end simple and

utterly transparent of soul, calmly indifferent to wealth and vulgar ambitions, with a fine

wholesome of rusticity about him fresh as his own mountain breeze, as Ruskin put it. Absolute

sincerity was the keynote of his character, and the plain living and high thinking which he taught

were the rule of his own life. Little of a bookman, he spent his days in open air, and most of

his poetry was composed outdoors.

VIEWS

Wordsworth believed in the didactic power of poetry. In a Letter to Beaumont1 he stated that

Every great poet is a teacher: I wish either to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing.

He had the firmest faith in the moral influence of his own poems as attested by his lines written

in a Letter to Lady Beaumont. To console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight, by

making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think,

and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous: this is their office.

As poet-moralist he kept his attention fixed steadily on his two great themes Man and Nature as

attested by the Recluse: On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, Musing in solitude .
1 Prefaces and essays on poetry, with a letter to Lady Beaumont published in 1892.
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William Wordsworth as a nature poet

Most of the scholars and poets have rightly assume the fact that it has been rightly pointed out

the Wordsworth philosophy of nature with its emphasis on divinity of nature, natures plan, the

one life in universe and in man. He took nature as a wealth of wisdom and moral health etc. He

emphasized on the moral influence of nature. He spiritualized nature and regarded her as great

moral teacher. According to him nature deeply influences human character. In Tintern Abbey2

he tells his sister Dorothy that nature never did betray the heart that loved her.

As a poet of Nature, Wordsworth stands supreme. He is a worshipper of Nature, Natures devotee

or high-priest. His love of Nature was probably truer, and more tender, than that of any other

English poet, before or since. Nature comes to occupy in his poem a separate or independent

status and is not treated in a casual or passing manner as by poets before him. Wordsworth had a

full-fledged philosophy, a new and original view of Nature.

Part of the driving force behind the Romantic thinkers, of which Wordsworth is an essential

component, was to create a realm that was different than the preceding literary movement, the

Neoclassicists. The Romantics wanted to conceive of a setting which was not entirely urban, did

not focus on socializing with others, and develop an individual, as opposed to collective, sense of

self. In attempting to tear away the mask of in authenticity that dominated their perception of

Neoclassicism, Romantic thinkers saw nature as the perfect setting for their ideas and beliefs. Its

purity and splendor, its experience on an individual level, and its presence helped to fuse the

2 The full title of this poem is Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour.

July 13, 1798 . It was published in 1798.

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duality of mind and heart. This appealed to Wordsworth, which is why so many of his poems

have implications to the natural world or use it as their setting.

Three points in his creed of Nature may be noted:

(a) He conceived of Nature as a living Personality. He believed that there is a divine spirit pervading

all the objects of Nature. This belief in a divine spirit pervading all the objects of Nature may be

termed as mystical Pantheism and is fully expressed in Tintern Abbey and in several passages of

The Prelude.

(b) Wordsworth believed that the company of Nature gives joy to the human heart and he looked

upon Nature as exercising a healing influence on sorrow-stricken hearts.

(c) Above all, Wordsworth emphasized the moral influence of Nature. He spiritualised Nature and

regarded her as a great moral teacher, as the best mother, guardian and nurse of man, and as an

elevating influence. He believed that between man and Nature there is mutual consciousness,

spiritual communion or mystic intercourse. He initiates his readers into the secret of the souls

communion with Nature. According to him, human beings who grow up in the lap of Nature are

perfect in every respect.

Wordsworth believed that we can learn more of man and of moral evil and good from Nature

than from all the philosophies. In his eyes, Nature is a teacher whose wisdom we can learn, and

without which any human life is vain and incomplete. He believed in the education of man by

Nature. In this he was somewhat influenced by Rousseau 3. This inter-relation of Nature and man

is very important in considering Wordsworths view of both.

3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (28 June 1712 2 July 1778) was a Francophone Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of the 18th century.
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Cazamian4 says that To Wordsworth, Nature appears as a formative influence superior to any

other, the educator of senses and mind alike, the sower in our hearts of the deep-laden seeds of

our feelings and beliefs. It speaks to the child in the fleeting emotions of early years, and stirs the

young poet to an ecstasy, the glow of which illuminates all his work and dies of his life.

Development of His Love for Nature

4 Louis Franois Cazamian (2 April 1877 22 September 1965) was a French academic and literary critic.
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Wordsworths childhood had been spent in Natures lap. A nurse both stern and kindly, she

had planted seeds of sympathy and under-standing in that growing mind. Natural scenes like the

grassy Derwent river bank or the monster shape of the night-shrouded mountain played a

needful part in the development of his mind.

In The Prelude5, he records dozens of these natural scenes, not for themselves but for what

his mind could learn through. Most of the imagery, as well as the diction, reflects the natural

environment, especially the English countryside, and manages to capture much of the

wildness and beauty of that terrain. The influence of the English character may be traced

in many of the ideas behind the poem. Just as Wordsworth never got far or was long from

his native regions physically, so they continued to color his emotional reactions throughout

his life.

To the bare earth dropped with a startling sound.

From that soft couch I rose not, till the sun

Had almost touched the horizon; casting then

A backward glance upon the curling cloud

Of city smoke, by distance ruralised;

Keen as a Truant or a Fugitive,

It is doubtful that he would have created an inimitable philosophy of nature had he been

reared in London's slums. In his lifetime, his mental outlook swung from youthful radicalism to

ultraconservatism. Politically, the fierce independence of character the poet admired in the

5 The Prelude is an autobiographical poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Intended as the introduction to the more
philosophical Recluse, which Wordsworth never finished, The Prelude is an extremely personal and revealing work on the details of
Wordsworth's life. Wordsworth began The Prelude in 1798 at the age of 28 and continued to work on it throughout his life.
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yeoman of the North Country came to be symbolized by the French patriot; later he felt that

conservative British institutions were the bulwark of true freedom. Artistically and religiously, he

found youthful inspiration in the hills and vales of the Lake District; he responded to them with

his simple ballads and a joyous mysticism

Nature was both law and impulse; and in earth and heaven, in glade and bower,

Wordsworth was conscious of a spirit which kindled and restrained. In a variety of exciting ways,

which he did not understand, Nature intruded upon his escapades and pastimes, even when he

was indoors, speaking memorable things. He had not sought her; neither was he intellectually

aware of her presence. She riveted his attention by stirring up sensations of fear or joy which

were organic, affecting him bodily as well as emotionally. With time the sensations were fixed

indelibly in his memory. All the instances in Book I of The Prelude show a kind of primitive

animism at work; the emotions and psychological disturbances affect external scenes in such a

way that Nature seems to nurture by beauty and by fear.

In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth traces the development of his love for Nature. In his boyhood

Nature was simply a playground for him. At the second stage he began to love and seek Nature

but he was attracted purely by its sensuous or aesthetic appeal. Finally his love for Nature

acquired a spiritual and intellectual character, and he realized Natures role as a teacher and

educator. Tintern Abbey is the young Wordsworths first great statement of his principle

(great) theme: that the memory of pure communion with nature in childhood works upon the

mind even in adulthood, when access to that pure communion has been lost, and that the maturity

of mind present in adulthood offers compensation for the loss of that communionspecifically,

the ability to look on nature and hear human music; that is, to see nature with an eye

toward its relationship to human life.

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Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,

As may have had no trivial influence

On that best portion of a good mans life;

His little, nameless, unremembered acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In the Immortality Ode he tells us that as a boy his love for Nature was a thoughtless

passion but that when he grew up, the objects of Nature took a sober colouring from his eyes and

gave rise to profound thoughts in his mind because he had witnessed the sufferings of humanity:

That hath kept watch oer mans mortality;

Another race hath been, and other palms are won

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Spiritual Meaning in Natural Objects

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Compton Rickett6 rightly observes that Wordsworth is far less concerned with the sensuous

manifestations than with the spiritual significance that he finds underlying these manifestations.

To him the primrose and the daffodil are symbols to him of Natures message to man. A sunrise

for him is not a pageant of colour; it is a moment of spiritual consecration:

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows

Were then made for me; bound unknown to me

Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,

A dedicated Spirit.

Wordsworth understands of who he is changes as he grows older, as it probably does with

most people. He sees changes in himself from the innocent boy of childhood who would run

to Nature for the pleasure of its beauty, to someone who would turn to Nature as a nurturer

and protector of what he believes. This change does not only happen in people who are

spiritual, but his recognition of the existence of a mysterious presence outside himself

changes the way he sees himself. His change over the five years between his two visits to the

River Wye in Tintern Abbey represents two changes that are concordant with each other: a

change in himself and a change in his spiritual beliefs. He has a greater appreciation in his

second trip of the presence that disturbs him, and he also has a different view of who he is. He

recognizes both of these differences, and realizes that throughout his life as his spirituality is

strengthened, his self identity will change. A spiritual view of the world changes the way one

sees himself in relation to the world. Again, Wordsworths spirituality lies not merely in the way

6 Sir Joseph Compton-Rickett, DL PC (13 February 1847 30 July 1919), was a British Liberal Party politician. His work The history of
literature is an analysis of English literature.
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he appreciates the beauty of the world, but in the way this beauty changes him. He is aware of

the connection he has to all living beings, and to all of Nature. There is an awareness of the

spiritual oneness that exists among all things of this earth.

Conclusion:
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Wordsworths attitude to Nature can be clearly differentiated from that of the other great

poets of Nature. He did not prefer the wild and stormy aspects of Nature like Byron, or the

shifting and changeful aspects of Nature and the scenery of the sea and sky like Shelley, or the

purely sensuous in Nature like Keats. It was his special characteristic to concern himself, not

with the strange and remote aspects of the earth, and sky, but Nature in her ordinary, familiar,

everyday moods. He did not recognize the ugly side of Nature red in tooth and claw as

Tennyson did. Wordsworth stressed upon the moral influence of Nature and the need of mans

spiritual discourse with her. Wordsworth records his own feelings with reference to the objects

which stimulate him and call forth the description. His unique apprehension of Nature was

determined by his peculiar sense-endowment. His eye was at once far-reaching and penetrating.

Bibliography
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