William Wordsworth

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Data:	02.07.2007
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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

LIFE

W.Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in the english lake discrict. He was educated at st john’s college,Cambridge, and in 1790 he went on a walking tour of france and the alps. In 1795 he moved to somerset to be near Samuel taylor Coleridge. Their friendship proved crucial to the development of English romantic poetry: they produced a collection of poems called Lirycal Ballads which appeared anonymously in 1798. the second edition of 1800 also contained Wordsworth’s famous Preface, which was to become the Manifesto of English Romanticism. In 1802 william married a childhood friend.

THE MANIFESTO OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM

Wordsworth did not want to write following the standars of eighteenth-century poetry. In his Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads ,he stated what the subject matter and the language of poetry should be. Poetry should deal with everyday situations or incidents and with ordinary people, especially humble, rural people. Even the language should be simple ,the objects mentioned homely and called by their ordinary names.

MAN AND THE NATURAL WORLD

Wordsworth is interested in the relationship between the natural world and the human consciousness. His poetry therefore offers a detailed account of the complex interaction between man and the nature. The idea that man and nature are inseparable; man exists not outside the natural world but as an active participant in it, so that nature to wordsworth means something that includes both inanimate and human nature, each is a part of the same whole.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE SENSES

Nature means also the world of sense perception. For Wordsworth there are three ages of man: childhood, youth and adulthood. In fact, wordsworth was most interested in the growth of his relationship with nature, in the ways it influenced him at different points in his life and the ways in which his awareness of it changed.

CHILDHOOD AND THE MEMORY

He regarded childhood as the most important stage in man’s life. What the child sees is both more imaginative and more vivid than the perceptions of the adult. Memory is a major force in the process of growth of the poet’s mind and moral character, and it is memory that allows Wordsworth to give poetry its life and power.
RECOLLECTED IN TRANQUILLITY

All genuine poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity” so that what we read in the poems results from the active,vital relationship of present to past experience.the poet has greater sensibility and the ability to penetrate to the heart of things. Wordsworth used blank verse,that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter. He proved skilful at several verse forms such as sonnets, odes, ballads and lyrics with short lines and simple rhymes.