William Wordsworth and the Romantic Movement in England

Introduction to Wordsworth and the Romantic Movement

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

Biographical Influences and Early Works

After graduating from Cambridge, Wordsworth traveled abroad, where he fell in love with Annette Vallon in France, with whom he had a daughter, Caroline, though he and Annette never married. Wordsworth was strongly influenced by the spirit of the French Revolution and the principles of Rousseau and republicanism.

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." These works were written in eighteenth-century vocabulary and style.

Lyrical Ballads and the Language of Common People

In 1798, Wordsworth, together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, wrote Lyrical Ballads, poetry in which they used the language of the common people. The collection included Wordsworth's poem "Tintern Abbey" and introduced Romanticism into England, becoming a manifesto for Romantic poets. The Romantic Era ushered in a time when the nature of mankind was no longer defined by the rationalizing Georgian imagination, but lay instead in "potentiality, the inner depths of what Freud would later call the unconscious" (Hughes). The environment became a source 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).

Tintern Abbey: Nature, Time, and Regeneration

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). Peter Brier suggests that "Tintern Abbey" contributes more to the poem's symbolic structure than previously suspected (Petters). According to Petters, the abbey's structure represented for Wordsworth "a human-made object in the midst of a divine-made nature" (Petters). The poem 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."

What had once been non-procreative has become procreative through its "degeneration and return to the ever-regenerative nature of its surroundings" (Petters). Petters stresses that Wordsworth's poem does not refer to the abbey directly because he cannot see it; rather, the abbey has become a part of the natural landscape. It is no longer a human-made object separate from nature but a natural object in the midst of nature — "it has disappeared into the landscape" (Petters). This hopeful regeneration represents rebirth and renewed life, an actual life coming from death (Petters).

In the poem, the answer to life is found in living the present — not the past, nor in a state of frozen time (Petters). Harold Bloom writes that for Wordsworth, "to call something 'human' is to eulogize it" (Petters). 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). The abbey served as the catalyst for Wordsworth's discovery that meaning is found in the present moment rather than in a longing for the past.

Works Cited

Hughes, Robert. "Sharing the Poet's Obsession." Time, 14 Dec. 1987.

Kneale, J. Douglas. "Wordsworth, William." Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory.

Petters, John G. "Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey.'" The Explicator, 1 Jan. 2003.

"The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth." Bartleby.com.

"Wordsworth, William." The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed., 7 June 2005.