Wi lliam Wordsworth

1. William Wordsworth Benjamin Robert Haydon, William Wordsworth, 1842, London, National Portrait Gallery.

2. William Wordsworth Life • Born in Cockermouth in Cumberland in 1770. • His father, a lawyer, taught him poetry and allowed him access to his library. • 1791: B. A. Degree at St John’s College, Cambridge. Wordsworth’s House in Cockermouth, Cumberland

3. In 1791 he travelled to Revolutionary Franceand was fascinated by the Republican movement. • In 1792 he had a daughter, Caroline, from a French aristocratic woman, Annette Vallon. • The Reign of Terror led him to become estranged to the Republic, and the war between England and France caused him to return to England.

4. To recover from the disillusionment of these years he went to live in the Lake District, in close contact to nature. • In 1795 he developed a close friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he collaborated in the 1797-1799 period to write Lyrical Ballads. • In 1843 he became the Poet Laureate. • He died in 1850.

5. 2. Main works • Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems(1798). • Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems(1800). This edition contains the famous Preface, the Manifesto of English Romanticism. • Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). • The Excursion(1814). • The Prelude(1850). William Wordsworth, Shreveport, James Smith Noel Collection

6. From the Preface to Lyrical Ballads The object of poetry • “The principal object […] was to choose incidents and situations from common life […] to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination whereby (by which) ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way”. • Content  Things from ordinary life • Aim  To give these ordinary things the “charm of novelty” using imagination • Main interest Relationship between man and nature

7. The language of poetry • “The language […] of these (rural) men is adopted […] because, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions”. • Style  He abandoned 18th-century poetic diction and used the language of common men purified by the poet. • .

8. Who is the poet? • “What is a poet? […] He is a man speaking to men: a man […] endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness” • The poet = a teacher • He employs the sensibility of the eye and ear to perceive the beauty of nature. • He can feel deep emotions in contact to nature • He shows men how to understand their feelings and improve their moral being in contact to nature

9. What is poetry? “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquillity”

10. The poetic process Sensory experience Poet Emotion Object Memory = Recollection In Tranquillity Emotion Reader Kindred emotion Poem

11. Man and nature • Man and nature are inseparable. • Pantheistic viewof nature: it is the seat of the spirit of the universe. • Naturecomfortsman in sorrow, it is asource of joyand pleasure, it teaches man to love,to act in a moral way. • Man’s moral character develops during childhood in contact to nature