William Wordsworth. Preface to Lyrical Ballads
It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves.
The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title. It is desirable that such readers, for their own sakes, should not suffer the solitary word Poetry, a word of very disputed meaning, to stand in the way of their gratification; but that, while they are perusing this book, they should ask themselves if it contains a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents; and if the answer be favourable to the author's wishes, that they should consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision.
Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed it must be expected that many lines and phrases will not exactly suit their taste. It will perhaps appear to them, that wishing to avoid the prevalent fault of the day, the author has sometimes descended too low, and that many of his expressions are too familiar, and not of sufficient dignity. It is apprehended, that the more conversant the reader is with our elder writers, and with those in modern times who have been the most successful in painting manners and passions, the fewer complaints of this kind will he have to make.
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William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), British poet, credited with ushering in the English Romantic Movement with the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798) in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District. His father was John Wordsworth, Sir James Lowther's attorney. The magnificent landscape deeply affected Wordsworth's imagination and gave him a love of nature. He lost his mother when he was eight and five years later his father. The domestic problems separated Wordsworth from his beloved and neurotic sister Dorothy, who was a very important person in his life.
With the help of his two uncles, Wordsworth entered a local school and continued his studies at Cambridge University. Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787, when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. In that same year he entered St. John's College, Cambridge, from where he took his B.A. in 1791.
During a summer vacation in 1790 Wordsworth went on a walking tour through revolutionary France and also traveled in Switzerland. On his second journey in France, Wordsworth had an affair with a French girl, Annette Vallon, a daughter of a barber-surgeon, by whom he had a illegitimate daughter Anne Caroline. The affair was basis of the poem “Vaudracour and Julia”, but otherwise Wordsworth did his best to hide the affair from posterity.
In 1795 he met Coleridge. Wordsworth's financial situation became better in 1795 when he received a legacy and was able to settle at Racedown, Dorset, with his sister Dorothy. Encouraged by Coleridge and stimulated by the close contact with nature, Wordsworth composed his first masterwork, Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. About 1798 he started to write a large and philosophical autobiographical poem, completed in 1805, and published posthumously in 1850 under the title The Prelude. Wordsworth spent the winter of 1798-99 with his sister and Coleridge in Germany, where he wrote several poems, including the enigmatic “Lucy” poems. After return he moved Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and in 1802 married Mary Hutchinson. They cared for Wordsworth's sister Dorothy for the last 20 years of her life.
Wordsworth's second verse collection, Poems, In Two Volumes, appeared in 1807. Wordsworth's central works were produced between 1797 and 1808. His poems written during middle and late years have not gained similar critical approval. Wordsworth's Grasmere period ended in 1813. He was appointed official distributor of stamps for Westmoreland. He moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside, where he spent the rest of his life. In later life Wordsworth abandoned his radical ideas and became a patriotic, conservative public man. In 1843 he succeeded Robert Southey (1774-1843) as England's poet laureate. Wordsworth died on April 23, 1850.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Glenn Everett, Associate Professor of English, University of Tennessee at Martin)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born October 21, 1772, at Ottery St. Mary's, Devonshire, the youngest of 14 children. His father, John Coleridge, the parish vicar, died in 1781 just before Coleridge's ninth birthday. He was then sent to a boarding school, Christ's Hospital, as a charity scholar. A brilliant student, he went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1791, on a small allowance provided by his brother George. Although he won a college medal in his first year for a long poem in Greek and was one of four finalists for a scholarship in his second, he was at the same time going through an adolescent crisis, experimenting with alcohol, opium, and sex, and falling in love with Mary Evans, the sister of a friend.
In December 1793 he left school and joined the Dragoons (under the alias Silas Tomkyn Comerbacke), but kept falling off his horse. By the following April his brothers had found out where he was, bailed him out, and convinced him to return to Cambridge. That summer (1794) he left school again and met the poet Robert Southey, with whom he planned a utopian “Pantisocracy” to be established on the banks of the Susquehanna. The plan required that each participant be married, and Southey married Edith Fricker and Coleridge married her younger sister Sara. When the plans for the Pantisocracy fell through, the two of them were trapped in an uncongenial marriage.
By now Coleridge, who was earning his keep partly as a Unitarian preacher, had begun seriously to write poetry. He became close friends to William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, who moved to Alfoxden in 1797 to be near the Coleridges at Nether Stowey, and the two poets planned Lyrical Ballads, which appeared in 1798. Coleridge's most important contribution was The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. That same September the three of them visited Germany, a visit much more important to Coleridge than to Wordsworth. In Germany, Coleridge discovered Kant, Schiller, Schelling, A.W. Schlegel, and he came back to England imbued with the spirit of German Romantic thought.
In 1799 Coleridge joined the Wordsworths, who were staying at the Hutchinson farm in Durham. Wordsworth was waiting for an inheritance to be settled so he could wed Mary Hutchinson; and Coleridge fell in love with her sister Sara, who appears in his journals and poems as Asra.
From the time of his marriage on, Coleridge was searching for a vocation that would pay the rent, although the annuity of Ј150 from the Wedgwoods eased these concerns after 1798 and meant that he did not need to take up a career as a Unitarian minister. It is interesting to speculate if he would have later returned to the Church of England without that timely annuity.
Perhaps because he conceived such grand projects, he had difficulty carrying them through to completion, and he berated himself for his “indolence.” It is unclear whether his growing use of opium was a symptom or a cause of his growing depression. Dejection: An Ode, written in 1802, expresses his despair at the loss of his creative powers. In 1804 he travelled to Sicily and Malta, working for a time as Acting Public Secretary of Malta under the Commissioner, Alexander Ball. He gave this up and returned to England in 1806; Dorothy Wordsworth was shocked at his condition upon his return. His opium addiction (he was using as much as two quarts of laudanum a week) now began to take over his life: he separated from his wife in 1808, quarrelled with Wordworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, put himself under the care of Dr. Daniel in 1814, and finally moved in with Dr. Gilman in Highgate, London, where the doctor and his family managed for the next 18 years to keep his demon under control.
At this same time he was establishing himself as the most intellectual of the English Romantics, delivering an influential series of lectures on Shakespeare in the winter of 1811-12 and bringing out his Biographia Literaria in 1817. Among his contemporaries, he was best known as a talker, in the tradition of Samuel Johnson: his “Highgate Thursdays” became famous. He died July 25, 1834.