William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is an important figure in English poetry. He found his inspiration in the lakes and mountains, and sought to present the simplicity of everyday life.
Wordsworth and the Lake District
A map of Wordsworth’s life can be tracked across his beloved homeland of North England’s Lake District. He was born in Cockermouth, in what is now called Wordsworth House, in 1770. After some time spent in revolutionary France in 1791-2, where he impregnated a French woman called Annette Vallon, a brief stint in Somerset, where he met Coleridge, and a winter spent living in Germany, homesick Wordsworth returned to the lakes and mountains.
Dove Cottage in Grasmere is probably the most famous of Wordsworth’s lakeside residences; he lived here with his sister Dorothy from 1799 to 1808. Wordsworth’s final residence was Rydal Mount, Ambleside; he lived here from 1813, until his death in 1850. This beautiful old house, perched high in the trees, seems the perfect resting place for Wordsworth, thanks to its far-reaching views and homemade garden, with long walkways to stride along whilst turning new lines if poetry over in his head.
Rydal just a short walk from Dove Cottage, skirting along Nab Scar; it was what Wordsworth would have considered a short walk, anyway. He was a man that climbed Helvellyn, England and the Lake District’s third highest peak with a ‘sharp edge’ ascent that has a reputation as prickly as its name, at the tender age of 72 (see Benjamin Robert Haydon’s depiction of the aged Wordsworth atop Helvellyn).
Wordsworth’s Friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge formed one of the most influential writing partnerships when they published ‘Lyrical Ballads’. This poetry collection includes Coleridge’s poems such as ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ alongside some of Wordsworth’s, including ‘Lines written above Tintern Abbey’. 'Lyrical Ballads' was shocking when released as the book’s strongly worded introduction argues for a new ‘experimental’ kind of poetry, a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.
Although Wordsworth and Coleridge had similar ideas about freedom in poetry and the power of the imagination and the natural world, the two men were very different. Coleridge spent much of his life addicted to opium. Sleeping over at Dove Cottage, he would wake up screaming in the middle of the night with awful nightmares. These led to Gothic poems, such as the creepy ‘Christabel’ and otherworldly ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.
William Hazlitt, prolific non-fiction writer and chum to Wordsworth and Coleridge, distinguished between his pals’ poetry by their walking styles. In his article ‘My First Aquaintance with the Poets’, Hazlitt wrote that Coleridge ‘seemed unable to keep on in a straight line’ and ‘liked to compose in walking over uneven ground or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood’, whilst Wordsworth ‘always wrote...walking up and down a straight gravel walk’. This would explain the straight walkways Wordsworth had lined up across his garden in Rydal Mount, and perhaps his inclination to write his long, autobiographical poem The Prelude.
Wordsworth’s Imagination - ‘That inward eye’ from the ‘Daffodils’ Poem
Much of Wordsworth’s poetry is both about and an act of the power of the imagination. Of course, Wordsworth is a nature poet – he adored the natural world and wrote much of his poetry whilst striding through Lakeland – but according to Wordsworth, trees and mountains and lakes and leaves and flowers and sheep are not just passive inspiration for the poet, nor are poet and nature entirely separate. For Wordsworth, the natural world figuratively impresses the human mind. Look, for example, at the final verse of the famous ‘Daffodils’ poem:
For oft when on my couch I lie,
In vacant or in pensive mood
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
Through the interaction between nature and the human mind, Wordsworth feels as though, when lying on his ‘couch’, he is transported back to the moment at which he first saw the dancing ‘daffodils.’ The ‘inward eye’ can be seen as the imagination, which has been impressed with image of the daffodils, like a book printed with letters. The fact that it is described as ‘the bliss of solitude’ suggests that it is a very personal, solitary experience. This idea is important to Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, who conceive of the poet as a lone thinker, open to experiences and natural beauty, who wanders ‘like a cloud,’ as a part of the natural world. Look again at Benjamin Robert Haydon’s depiction of the aged Wordsworth atop Helvellyn.
The Role of Wordsworth’s Sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, in Wordsworth’s Poetry
Although Wordsworth did have a wife, Mary Wordsworth, he was also very close to another woman, a permanent feature in his life: his sister Mary. The siblings were sent to live separately when their mother died in 1778, but were joyfully reunited later and moved in together in Somerset in 1797. The siblings lived together for most of their adult life, even when William was married to Mary.
Dorothy is thought to have had a key role in Wordsworth’s poetry; she kept diaries with a similar focus on describing experience of the beauty of the Lake District. In her role as scribe Dorothy was often the one to first put Wordsworth’s ideas to paper. Sometimes walking in the hills with Wordsworth, she would jot down his ideas. Who knows if she ever changed any words, or misheard or miswrote them? In this way, Dorothy was a mediator between Wordsworth’s mind and his words. She was, at times, more than this, though. Some readers believe that, were not for Dorothy’s input, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ would have read ‘I wandered lonely as a cow.’ Even more importantly, it as been suggested that the ‘Daffodils’ poem’s key idea – ‘that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude’ – was Dorothy’s idea. Perhaps this poem, ‘Daffodils,’ as well as being a moving exploration of the powerful relationship between nature and the imagination, is also a labour of love between siblings who shared deep affection for the natural world.
To read more, see The Wordsworth Centre for the Study of Poetry.
Kate Johnson - I grew up in Rainford, St. Helens in North West England. After sixth-form, I read English at Mansfield College, Oxford and graduated in ...
