What did William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
Why is William Wordsworth called a nature poet?
Wordsworth was called by Shelly “Poet of nature”. He, too, called himself “A Worshiper of Nature”. He held a firm faith that nature could enlighten the kindheartedness and universal brotherhood of human being, and only existing in harmony with nature where man could get true happiness.
What is Wordsworth's view of nature?
Wordsworth viewed nature as an expression of the divine. Like most Romantic poets, he privileged it over civilization as a purer expression of God's presence on earth. Many of his poems celebrate the divinity, solace, and simple joy he found in the natural world.
Is Wordsworth a preast of nature?
Wordsworth is the high priest of Nature. It goes to his credit that he propounded a new and original philosophy of Nature, and expounded a new and individual view of Nature. The love of Nature is to be found in all the English poets, from Chaucer downwards. In Wordsworth’s own day both Byron and Shelley were writing poems thoroughly imbued ...
Why is William Wordsworth called a romantic poet?
Wordsworth is considered as a poet of romance because His poetry was an elixir of life to a lover. Be it nature or love for beauty, Wordsworth Crafted his poems exquisitely. This pantheistic poet was an epitome of love and admiration towards nature and aesthetics.
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Why is William Wordsworth called as a poet of nature?
Wordsworth was called by Shelly “Poet of nature”. He, too, called himself “A Worshiper of Nature”. He held a firm faith that nature could enlighten...
What is Wordsworth's view of nature?
Wordsworth viewed nature as an expression of the divine. Like most Romantic poets, he privileged it over civilization as a purer expression of God'...
Is Wordsworth a preast of nature?
Wordsworth is the high priest of Nature. It goes to his credit that he propounded a new and original philosophy of Nature, and expounded a new and...
Why is William Wordsworth called a romantic poet?
Wordsworth is considered as a poet of romance because His poetry was an elixir of life to a lover. Be it nature or love for beauty, Wordsworth Craf...
What does Wordsworth see nature as?
Wordsworth sees Nature as, in some sense, a projection of the mind of man. This is typical of Romanticism, with its focus on the inner self, its perception of man as a kind of godlike being, and its concept of the literal outer world as in some way an illusion, a cover of the ultimate reality that lies beneath it.
What is the poem that Wordsworth says about nature?
One of the poems in which Wordsworth is explicit about the effects of nature is " The Tables Turned ," in which the speaker urges his friend to stop reading and learn from the beauty of nature instead. The poem contains the famous lines, Let Nature be your teacher.
What is the romantic mindset of Wordsworth?
A privileging of nature and an appreciation of its beauty and uncorrupted purity are hallmarks of the Romantic mindset. Wordsworth is one of nature's premier advocates , urging all humans to avail themselves of its healing and solace. Wordsworth sees Nature as, in some sense, a projection of the mind of man.
What does Wordsworth say about the vernal wood?
One impulse from a vernal wood. May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. At the end of the poem, Wordsworth contrasts the direct spiritual wisdom to be gained from nature with the dull, "barren" facts contained in books. Wordsworth is always closer to Christianity than to Pantheism.
What is the meaning of the "intimations of immortality"?
In what might be his most famous work, the "Intimations of Immortality" Ode, Wordsworth links his sense of self (and the immortality of his psyche) to the outside world. As a child, he communed directly with nature and felt something magical and eternal in it; as an adult, he has lost the immediacy of this feeling, but through the remembrance of childhood, he is able to console himself that these "intimations" were real and valid:
What did Wordsworth try to communicate in his poems?
In his poems, Wordsworth tried to communicate the healing power of nature and the joy it could bring.
What is Wordsworth's philosophy?
Wordsworth was a sincere naturalist and loved unspoiled nature for itself . However, he also lived out a Romantic philopsphy. As a result, his poetry explores the interaction between the natural world and the human mind. This interaction took the form of continuous cycle of contacting nature through observation and altering the "thing in itself" (Kant) through meditation. Wordsworth was aware of the fact that human intelligence often interpreted phenomena in a manner that added to it what may not be visibly present. One example, might be seen in his propensity to add human values to natural activities. Such as elevating the work of ants routinely tending to an act of nobility and wonder. By creating a worldview based on such insights, one upon layer placed upon the next, Wordsworth came to view the world as wonder the design of which should evoke deep passion in those who correctly observe it.
What is the effect of Wordsworth's love of nature?
One effect of his ardent love of Nature in Wordsworth is that he excels all other poets in the fidelity of his descriptions, the minute accuracy of his observation of natural beauty. His eye for nature is always fresh and true, and what he sees he describes with an admirable realism. His sense of form and colour is also perfect, and in nothing is he so great an artist as in his power of conveying in a phrase the exact truth of the things he sees. When he speaks of the voice of the stock-dove as “buried among trees”, he uses the only, word that could completely convey to us the idea of seclusion, the remote depth of greenwood in which the dove loves to hide herself. The star-shaped shadow of the daisy cast upon the stone is noted also with the same loving accuracy, and can only be the result of direct observation. Nothing escaped his vigilance, and his sense of sound was as perfect as his power of vision. The wild wind-swept summit of a mountain-pass could hardly be better painted than in this word-picture:
What is Wordsworth's attitude towards nature?
The second stage is reached in the ‘Lyrical, Ballads ,’ where Wordsworth begins to present his idea of nature as something alive. In some poems such as ‘ Nutting ‘ it is yet vague. But in other pieces, he refers to the pleasure or joy felt by nature, and in some, as in ‘ Tintern Abbey ‘ he speaks of an all-pervading presence in nature as much as in the thinking mind, thus rising to the conception of a unity between the subject and the object. Here his pantheism becomes a distinct element.
What is the difference between Wordsworth and Shelley?
Both Shelley and Wordsworth believed in nature as an independent living existence, but Shelley does not care for its ethical influence. He does not, like Wordsworth, brood over nature, but in passionate and emotional ardour he plunges himself into the very existence of nature.
What are the two things that stand out prominently in Wordsworth in connection with nature?
Two things stand out prominent in Wordsworth in connection with nature viz. its spiritual life, and ethical influence and the influence nature exerts as a moral teacher on man.
What is the peculiarity of Wordsworth's poetry?
It is one of the peculiar features of Wordsworth’s nature poetry that all the attention of the poet is directed to the representation of calm and tranquil sights and scenes of nature. He never presents nature ‘red in tooth and claw’. Aldous Huxley in his essay Wordsworth in the Tropics draws our attention to this fact that “Wordsworth’s conception of nature is one sided. He deals only with the trim and well-dressed nature as it is in the Lake Districts, but he has not one word to say about the malevolent aspect of nature-nature ‘red in tooth and claw’”.
What is the joy of nature in Wordsworth's poems?
The personal dealing with nature in all her moods ‘produces a joy a plenteousness of delight and all readers of Wordsworth’s nature poems feel that sense of exultation and joy which the poet himself had experienced in his life.’ In the words of W. H. Hudson, “Wordsworth finds a never failing principle of joy.” The hare runs races in her mirth, the flowers enjoy the air they breathe and the waves dance beside the daffodils:
What is Wordsworth's spiritual representation of nature?
Wordsworth’s representations of nature’s mystical and spiritual aspects are quite graphic, vivid and colourful. He can give delicate and subtle expression to the “sheer sensuous delight of the world of Nature.” He can feel elemental joy of spring:
What is William Wordsworth known for?
He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and a fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry. The son of John and Ann Cookson Wordsworth, William Wordworth was born on April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, located in the Lake District of England: an area that would become closely associated with Wordsworth for over two centuries after his death. He began writing poetry as a young boy in grammar school, and before graduating from college he went on a walking tour of Europe, which deepened his love for nature and his sympathy for the common man: both major themes in his poetry. Wordsworth is best known for Lyrical Ballads, co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and The Prelude, a Romantic epic poem chronicling the “growth of a poet’s mind.”
Why did Wordsworth go to Cambridge?
In 1787, despite poor finances caused by ongoing litigation over Lord Lowther's debt to John Wordsworth's estate, Wordsworth went up to Cambridge as a sizar in St. John’s College. As he himself later noted, Wordsworth’s undergraduate career was not distinguished by particular brilliance.
Why was Wordsworth intoxicated?
Wordsworth was intoxicated by the combination of revolutionary fervor he found in France—he and Jones arrived on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille—and by the impressive natural beauty of the countryside and mountains.
Where did Wordsworth live in 1795?
During this period Wordsworth met another radical young man with literary aspirations, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1794 and 1795 Wordsworth divided his time between London and the Lake Country. In September 1795 William and Dorothy Wordsworth settled at Racedown Lodge in Dorset, where they would live for two years.
What was Wordsworth's passion for democracy?
Wordsworth’s passion for democracy, as is clear in his “Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” (also called “Ap ology for the French Revolution”), is the result of his two youthful trips to France. In November 1791 Wordsworth returned to France, where he attended sessions of the National Assembly and the Jacobin Club.
What happened to John Wordsworth?
Though separated from their sister, all the boys eventually attended school together at Hawkshead, staying in the house of Ann Tyson. In 1787, despite poor finances caused by ongoing litigation over Lord Lowther's debt to John Wordsworth's estate, Wordsworth went up to Cambridge as a sizar in St. John’s College. As he himself later noted, Wordsworth’s undergraduate career was not distinguished by particular brilliance. In the third book of The Prelude Wordsworth recorded his reactions to life at Cambridge and his changing attitude toward his studies. During his last summer as an undergraduate, he and his college friend Robert Jones—much influenced by William Coxe’s Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Swisserland (1779)—decided to make a tour of the Alps, departing from Dover on July 13, 1790.
When did Ann Wordsworth die?
In March of 1778 Ann Wordsworth died while visiting a friend in London. In June 1778 Dorothy was sent to live in Halifax, Yorkshire, with her mother’s cousin Elizabeth Threlkeld, and she lived with a succession of relatives thereafter. She did not see William again until 1787.
Where did William Wordsworth grow up?
William Wordsworth grew up in the Lake District of northern England. There he spent much of his boyhood playing outdoors and exploring the mountains and lake-strewn valleys—“foster'd alike by beauty and by fear,” as he would later testify in his autobiographical poem The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind.
What was the darkest time of Wordsworth's life?
The three or four years that followed his return to England were the darkest of Wordsworth’s life. Unprepared for any profession, rootless, virtually penniless, bitterly hostile to his own country’s opposition to the French, he lived in London in the company of radicals like William Godwin and learned to feel a profound sympathy for the abandoned mothers, beggars, children, vagrants, and victims of England’s wars who began to march through the sombre poems he began writing at this time. This dark period ended in 1795, when a friend’s legacy made possible Wordsworth’s reunion with his beloved sister Dorothy —the two were never again to live apart—and their move in 1797 to Alfoxden House, near Bristol.
What were the consequences of Wordsworth's partnership with Coleridge?
First it turned him away from the long poems on which he had laboured since his Cambridge days. These included poems of social protest like Salisbury Plain, loco-descriptive poems such as An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches (published in 1793), and The Borderers, a blank-verse tragedy exploring the psychology of guilt (and not published until 1842). Stimulated by Coleridge and under the healing influences of nature and his sister, Wordsworth began in 1797–98 to compose the short lyrical and dramatic poems for which he is best remembered by many readers. Some of these were affectionate tributes to Dorothy, some were tributes to daffodils, birds, and other elements of “Nature’s holy plan,” and some were portraits of simple rural people intended to illustrate basic truths of human nature.
Where was Wordsworth born?
Wordsworth was born in the Lake District of northern England, the second of five children of a modestly prosperous estate manager. He lost his mother when he was 7 and his father when he was 13, upon which the orphan boys were sent off by guardian uncles to a grammar school at Hawkshead, a village in the heart of the Lake District. At Hawkshead Wordsworth received an excellent education in classics, literature, and mathematics, but the chief advantage to him there was the chance to indulge in the boyhood pleasures of living and playing in the outdoors. The natural scenery of the English lakes could terrify as well as nurture, as Wordsworth would later testify in the line “I grew up fostered alike by beauty and by fear,” but its generally benign aspect gave the growing boy the confidence he articulated in one of his first important poems, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey…,” namely, “that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”
Where did Wordsworth go to college?
Wordsworth moved on in 1787 to St. John’s College, Cambridge. Repelled by the competitive pressures there, he elected to idle his way through the university, persuaded that he “was not for that hour, nor for that place.” The most important thing he did in his college years was to devote his summer vacation in 1790 to a long walking tour through revolutionary France. There he was caught up in the passionate enthusiasm that followed the fall of the Bastille, and became an ardent republican sympathizer. Upon taking his Cambridge degree—an undistinguished “pass”—he returned in 1791 to France, where he formed a passionate attachment to a Frenchwoman, Annette Vallon. But before their child was born in December 1792, Wordsworth had to return to England and was cut off there by the outbreak of war between England and France. He was not to see his daughter Caroline until she was nine.
Who was the poet who lived with Dorothy in 1797?
The great decade: 1797–1808. While living with Dorothy at Alfoxden House, Wordsworth became friends with a fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They formed a partnership that would change both poets’ lives and alter the course of English poetry.
Who wrote the poem "The spontaneous overflow of feelings"?
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) produced some of the greatest English poems of the late 1700s and early 1800s. In contrast to the decorum of much 18th-century verse, he wanted to relate “situations from common life” in “language really used by men,” embodying “the spontaneous overflow of feelings…recollected in tranquility” ...
Why is Blake so similar to Wordsworth?
It is common to connect Blake and Wordsworth because of their ballads about babies and sheep. They were utterly opposite. If Wordsworth was the Poet of Nature, Blake was specially the Poet of Anti Nature.
Why is it common to connect Blake and Wordsworth?
G.K. Chesterton sums it up in his biography of Blake: It is common to connect Blake and Wordsworth because of their ballads about babies and sheep. They were utterly opposite. If Wordsworth was the Poet of Nature, Blake was specially the Poet of Anti Nature.
Who was appalled by the following passage in Wordsworth's poem The Excursion?
But this wasn’t the only respect in which they differed. Blake was appalled by the following passage in Wordsworth’s poem The Excursion:
Did Wordsworth worship nature?
A number of readers have felt that his [ie Wordsworth’s] poetry honours and even worships Nature; and in this they have the support of Blake, a man so sensitive to any trace of ‘Natural Religion’ that he blamed some verses of Wordsworth’s for a bowel complaint which almost killed him.
