William Wordsworth: life, works, and literary influence

William Wordsworth, 1770-1850, is considered one of the great English poets and leader of the Romantic Movement in England (Wordsworth pp). He was a defining member of the Romantic Movement in England and like other Romantics, his personality and poetry were heavily influenced by his love of nature, particularly the scenic area of Lake Country where he spent most of his adult life (Complete pp). Wordsworth was an honest philosopher who displayed a sincerity that was tempered with a love and appreciation of simplicity (Complete pp).

After graduation from Cambridge, Wordsworth traveled abroad, where he fell in love with Annette Vallon in France, with whom he had a daughter, Caroline, although he and Annette never married (Wordsworth pp). Wordsworth was strongly influenced by the spirit of the French Revolution and the principles of Rousseau and republicanism (Wordsworth pp). A year after returning to England, he published "An Evening Walk," ... "Fair scenes, erewhile, I taught, a happy child, The echoes of your rocks my carols wild: The spirit sought not then, in cherished sadness, A cloudy substitute for failing gladness," and "Descriptive Sketches," ... "Were there, below, a spot of holy ground, Where from distress a refuge might be found, And solitude prepare the soul for heaven; Sure, nature's God that spot to man had given," (Complete pp). These works were written in eighteenth century vocabulary and style (Wordsworth pp). In 1798, Wordsworth, together with Samuel Taylor, wrote "Lyrical Ballads," poetry in which they used the language of the common people, and included Wordsworth's poem "Tintern Abbey," and introduced Romanticism into England and became a manifesto for romantic poets Wordsworth pp).

John Petters writes in his critical essay, that Wordsworth chose Tintern Abbey for a "meditation on the relationship between time, change, and the landscape, for even in the late eighteenth century, the effects of time on the abbey were obvious" (Petters pp). And Peter Brier suggests that "Tintern Abbey" contributes more to the poem's symbolic structure than previously suspected (Petters pp). According to Petters, the abbey's structure represented for Wordsworth, "a human made object in the midst of a divine made nature" (Petters pp). It begins:

"Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

The day is come when I again repose

Here, under this dark sycamore, and view

These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,

Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,

Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves 'Mid groves and copses"

(Complete pp).

What had once been non-procreative has become procreative through its "degeneration and return to the ever-regenerative nature of its surroundings" (Petters pp). Petters stresses that Wordsworth poem does not refer to the abbey in the poem because he cannot see it but rather because the abbey has become a part of the natural landscape, it is no longer a human-made object separate from nature, but is a natural object in the midst of nature, "it has disappeared into the landscape" (Petters pp). This hopeful regeneration represents rebirth and renewed life, an actual life coming from death (Petters pp). In the poem the answer to life is found in living the present, not living in the past, nor in a state of frozen time (Petters pp). Harold Bloom writes that for Wordsworth "to call something 'human' is to eulogize it" (Petters pp). For Wordsworth, time is a necessary part of the human experience, and "in the progression of time in human existence we find beauty and truth and meaning and ultimately joy" (Petters pp). And the abbey was the "catalyst for Wordsworth's discovery and The Romantic Era rang in a time when the nature of mankind was no longer the rationalizing Georgian imagination, but lay in "potentiality, the inner depths of what Freud would later call the unconscious" (Hughes pp). The environment became of sense of wonder, man began to contemplate the natural world, and "grasps its relation to God ... The grander the spectacle of nature, the more the poet is drawn to self-understanding" (Hughes pp).