Wordsworth Flashcards
1
Q
What was Wordsworth’s education?
A
- Though Wordsworth, encouraged by his headmaster William Taylor, had been composing verse since his days at Hawkshead Grammar School, his poetic career begins with this first trip to France and Switzerland. During this period, he also formed his early political opinions—especially his hatred of tyranny. These opinions would be profoundly transformed over the coming years but never completely abandoned. Wordsworth was intoxicated by the combination of revolutionary fervour 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
- He graduated from Oxford in 1791 but it made little impact on him as he was shocked by the metropolitan squalor of the city
2
Q
What were Wordsworth’s religious beliefs?
A
- Religious upbringing, was taught the bible at a secondary school for upper-class children and held Anglican beliefs therefore he held literal beliefs of pantheism as he saw god manifested within nature
- Unlike Blake, his religious conservatism never interfered with his radical political views
- Like Blake, his religious conservatism never interfered with his radical political views
- Wordsworth emphasized personal piety, warm feelings towards God, and experiencing God for oneself
- Wordsworth believed that nature was prophetic of God’s will, and that excursions into nature were necessary to centre oneself in the chaos of ordinary life
- Wordsworth believed that spirituality should come from within the individual rather than the Church as an institution
3
Q
What were the lyrical ballad collections?
A
- The Lyrical Ballads (1798) – Written by Coleridge and Wordsworth, developing each other’s thinking and inspiring poetry. The poems often dwelt on nature and the pastoral, “because in that situation the passions of man are incorporated with the beauty and permanent forms of nature . They aimed to enlighten the common man through common life experiences and saw themselves as prophets ‘speak of what is important to men’, use ‘real language of men which they said was chronicling the “growth of a poet’s mind.”
- The collection also draws links on Rousseau’s beliefs as the industrial world forced man forced man to leave the purity of the pastoral world behind
- According to the theory that poetry resulted from the “spontaneous overflow” of emotions, as Wordsworth wrote in the preface, Wordsworth and Coleridge made it their task to write in the simple language of common people, telling concrete stories of their lives. According to this theory, poetry originated in “emotion recollected in a state of tranquility”; the poet then surrendered to the emotion, so that the tranquility dissolved, and the emotion remained in the poem
4
Q
What were in Wordsworth’s teenage years?
A
- When he lived with his uncle, in his teenage years, he was close to committing suicide implying his unhappiness as he lost his mother, father and connection to his sister Dorothy as she moved to Yorkshire
- Raised amid the mountains of Cumberland alongside the River Derwent, Wordsworth grew up in a rustic society, and spent a great deal of his time playing outdoors, in what he would later remember as a pure communion with nature
5
Q
What were Wordsworth’s experiences in France?
A
- The amount of suffering he saw in France caused him to realise that the peace in the country is how people should live to not be corrupted
- He had a daughter with French woman Annette Vallon who he met after his arrival in France on the first anniversary on the storming of the Bastille in 1792 who he didn’t meet until she was 9 because of the Napoleonic war
- He sent an unsent letter to the bishop of Landaff defending the French revolution and the execution of Louis XVI
- The chaos and bloodshed of the Reign of Terror in Paris drove William to philosophy books; he was deeply troubled by the rationalism he found in the works of thinkers such as William Godwin, which clashed with his own softer, more emotional understanding of the world. In despair, he gave up his pursuit of moral questions. In the mid-1790s, however, Wordsworth’s increasing sense of anguish forced him to formulate his own understanding of the world and of the human mind in more concrete terms
- Wordsworth had been an instinctive democrat since childhood, and his experiences in revolutionary France strengthened and developed his convictions. His sympathy for ordinary people would remain with Wordsworth even after his revolutionary fervor had been replaced with the “softened feudalism” he endorsed in his Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland in 1818
- Wordsworth, in fact, quoted Paine in his refutation of Bishop Watson’s appendix: “If you had looked in the articles of the rights of man, you would have found your efforts superseded. Equality, without which liberty cannot exist, is to be met with in perfection in that state in which no distinctions are admitted but such as have evidently for their object the general good.” Just how radical Wordsworth’s political beliefs were during this period can be judged from other passages in this “Letter”: “At a period big with the fate of the human race, I am sorry that you attach so much importance to the personal sufferings of the late royal martyr . … You wish it to be supposed that you are one of those who are unpersuaded of the guilt of Louis XVI. If you had attended to the history of the French revolution as minutely as its importance demands, so far from stopping to bewail his death, you would rather have regretted that the blind fondness of his people had placed a human being in that monstrous situation. …”
6
Q
How did he change as he aged?
A
- Freed from financial worries by a legacy left to him in 1795, Wordsworth moved with his sister Dorothy to Racedown, and then to Alfoxden in Grasmere, where Wordsworth could be closer to his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge together, Wordsworth and Coleridge began work on a book called Lyrical Ballads
- When he lived in Racedown, he set up a politically radical circle with Coleridge who were under government surveillance
- With financial prospects, Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson on October 2, 1802. The settlement helped to support a growing family and also allowed the Wordsworth to continue their generosity to various friends and men of letters, many of whom came to stay at Dove Cottage, sometimes for months on end
- The death of the earl of Lonsdale also marked the beginning of a close economic and political relationship between William Wordsworth and Sir William Lowther (who became earl of Lonsdale in 1807) that would have a significant effect on the poet’s political philosophy in the years to come
- As he aged, he became more conservative as he took a government job and was supportive towards the aristocracy by writing conservative pamphlets and upholding his Anglican beliefs despite when he was younger exploring if he was agnostic and if he believed in more than one God therefore Byron spoke Wordsworth had “turned out a Tory” at last as he spent his last years as a poet laureate
7
Q
How did Shelly criticise Wordsworth?
A
Shelley criticised Wordsworth on a more serious level for seemingly turning his back on the radical idealism of his youth, for having turned from radical icon to conservative disappointment
8
Q
How does Wordsworth perceive himself as a poet?
A
- He believed poetry should be conveyed through ordinary language about significant everyday events so it is comprehendible to understand however there is a deeper meaning about the personal connection to these events usually regarding nature
- Reflection allows mental, emotional and spiritual growth
- He was known as the poet of the ‘egotistical sublime’
- He believed as poetry should be written in “the real language of men,” is nevertheless “the spontaneous overflow of feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
9
Q
What is Wordsworth’s perception of children?
A
- Wordsworth believed that, upon being born, human beings move from a perfect, idealized realm in heaven into the imperfect, un-ideal earth. As children, some memory of the former purity and glory in which they lived remains, best perceived in the solemn and joyous relationship of the child to the beauties of nature. But as children grow older, the memory fades, and the magic of nature dies. Still, the memory of childhood can offer an important solace, which brings with it almost a kind of re-access to the lost purities of the past. And the maturing mind develops the capability to understand nature in human terms, and to see in its metaphors for human life, which compensate for the loss of the direct connection
10
Q
How did Wordsworth connect further with nature?
A
- 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 and a hatred of tyranny
- He was against industrialisation as a negative thing such as viewing railways as a scar on the landscape of his beloved Lake District
- He believed the, “earth has not anything to show more fair,” than grimy London illustrating a compassionate view of humanity’s relationship with the natural world
- Passions can be framed in such beautiful surroundings, far from vanity, where men can communicate in simple language
- Adults bring past experiences to their connection with nature unlike children who hold a sense of innocence towards nature as they lack emotional baggage
11
Q
What happened as a result of the second edition?
A
- The second edition—that of 1800—included an extended preface by Wordsworth, explaining his reasons for choosing to write as he had and setting out a personal poetics that has remained influential and controversial to the present day. For Victorian readers such as Matthew Arnold, who tended to venerate Wordsworth, the preface was a fount of wisdom; but the modernists were deeply suspicious of Wordsworth’s reliance on feeling: poets such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, while they could accept the strictures on poetic diction, found the underlying theory unacceptable
12
Q
How does Wordsworth link to the sublime?
A
- Wordsworth was a supporter of the sublime through Burke’s definition as, “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror,” in connection with abstract and obscure ideas
- Imagination is revealed as infinite in power and scope, appeared triumphant over, “the light of sense,” a synonym for the time – bound world of nature
- Dorothy’s sense of sublime differs from that of her brother insofar as it shows a greater willingness to dissolve the boundaries between self and other, whether that other is understood as plant, mineral or animal, indeed as God
13
Q
How was Wordsworth eco-conscious?
A
Believed in eco – conscious ecologist James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis that the earth is a single, vast living breathing ecosystem
14
Q
How did Wordsworth criticise the earlier poets?
A
Wordsworth was concerned about the elitism of earlier poets, whose highbrow language and subject matter were neither readily accessible nor particularly relevant to ordinary people. He maintained that poetry should be democratic; that it should be composed in ‘the language really spoken by men’ (Preface to Lyrical Ballads [1802]). For this reason, he tried to give a voice to those who tended to be marginalised and oppressed by society: the rural poor; discharged soldiers; ‘fallen’ women; the insane; and children
