11.
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
(1770-1850)
1. Blake and the problem of the new mythology
2. Successful modern answer to the problem of the lack of mythology was given by William
Wordsworth: demythologizing mythology
“[With Wordsworth] We begin de novo on a tabula rasa of poetry.” (from W. Hazlitt, ‘The
Spirit of the Age’)
Blake on Wordsworth:
‘I fear Wordsworth loves nature, and nature is the work of the Devil. The Devil is in us as far
as we are in nature.’
‘I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man Continually, & then
he is No Poet but a Heathen Philosopher at Enmity against all true Poetry or Inspiration.’
Wordsworth: a poet of nature and of self-consciousness
3. his life:
- happy childhood in the Lake District, though he lost his parents early (his mother when
he was 8, his father when he was 13)
- studies in Cambridge
- the effect of the French Revolution: 1790 – walking tour of the Alps; 1791-92 – spent a
year there, associated himself with the moderate Girondists, fell in love with Anette
Vallon and fathered their child, Caroline
- pangs of conscience on his return for abandoning his mistress and child and his
political friends; financial difficulties, eased by a legacy of ₤900 in 1795
- Coleridge’s neighbour 1797-98
- his great decade: 1797-1807 in the Lake District
- from 1799 he settled with Dorothy at Grasmere, married happily in 1802
- after his great decade his poetic inspiration left him; he became a champion of the
established order and a faithful member of the Church of England; he was made Poet
Laureate in 1843 but his poetry produced in this period is inferior to his early
masterpieces
- The Prelude (completed by 1805 but only published posthumously in 1850), intended
as a prologue to the three-part philosophical poem The Recluse of which only the first
section of the first part and the middle part (The Excursion, publ. 1814) were finished
4. 1798: Lyrical Ballads with a Few other Poems
1800: second, extended edition with a ‘Preface’
the 1802 version of the ‘Preface’ – the main issues discussed:
- topics and language of poetry
- the creative process: What is a poet? What is his function?
5. demythologizing mythology: growing up as the loss of Paradise
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
from ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)
The principal object, then, proposed 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 aspect; 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: …
Low 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, are less under restraint,
and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our
elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more
accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; (…) The language, too, of these
men has been adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting
and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best
objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their
rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the
influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated
expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular
feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is
frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon
themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of
men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, (…)
(…) For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but 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, had also
thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by
our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; (…)
***
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
The Child is father of the Man:
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
II
The rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the rose;
The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
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:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.