Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy (1999) A professor at Oxford University, Gill is one of the foremost experts on Wordsworth and deftly weaves together material on his life and work. Gill's biography is considered to be the definitive word on Wordsworth. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (1989)
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH POEMS FREE
In his preface to the second edition of the book, Wordsworth sounded off his vision of a new style in poetics, one free of the "gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers."_CITATION36_ Wordsworth and Coleridge's collaboration (though Wordsworth demanded sole author credit, five of the poems are by Coleridge) was the kick-off to the Romantic era. If you read just one book of Romantic poetry, make it this one.
William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1798) Maybe your soul-and your sanity-could use a little Wordsworth. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that Wordsworth did "more for the sanity of this generation than any other writer." The world is with us far more now than it was in the nineteenth century. By the time he died in 1850, Wordsworth was so famous that tourists flocked to the Lake District village of Grasmere just to peer in his windows. He had a few different families during his adult life, some of which were unconventional-a partner and illegitimate daughter in France during the French Revolution, an unorthodox but literary household containing his sister Dorothy and Coleridge, and eventually a wife and five kids. He wrote poems in his head as he wandered through the hills and moors. He lived in England's scenic Lake District instead of urban London. Wordsworth was the quintessential figure of Romanticism.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH POEMS SKIN
When he wrote about a field of daffodils, he didn't want you just to think about it-he wanted you to f eel those flowers, to feel the breeze against your skin and the sense of peace this sight brought to your soul. He wanted to create poetry that reunited readers with true emotions and feelings.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH POEMS FULL
Even in the nineteenth century, Wordsworth felt that the world was "too much with us"-too fast-paced, too noisy, too full of mindless entertainment. Their seminal 1798 poetry collection, Lyrical Ballads, helped to launch the Romantic era of English literature, in which writers sought to unite the tranquility of nature and the inner emotional world of men. Born in 1770, Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge invented a new style of poetry in which nature and the diction of the common man trumped formal, stylized language. But it is nowhere stronger than in his account from Book 1 of The Prelude of stealing a small rowing boat, the ‘elfin Pinnace’.William Wordsworth was an English poet, a key figure of Romanticism, and the author of the most famous poem ever written about daffodils. There are several episodes in The Prelude where Wordsworth describes this feeling. I hadn’t read Wordsworth at the time but later when we studied him at school I immediately recognised the feeling of being awed and at the same time fearful of nature – almost as if it was a live presence. I didn’t feel safe until I was back in the caravan. I took off my clothes and stepped into the freezing water and swam as far as the waterfall and then felt suddenly terrified and swam back as quickly as I could. The next morning, before my parents or sister woke, I got out of bed as quietly as I could and climbed up there on my own. It was a magical place, the pool surrounded by ferns and rowan trees and the water so clear that you could see the pebbles on the bottom. We stayed on a farm in Upper Langdale and one day we climbed up the nearby gill to a pool with a waterfall. When I was nine or ten I went to the Lake District with my parents on a caravan holiday. Introduced by a variety of writers, artists and other guests, the Scottish Poetry Library’s classic poem selections are a reminder of wonderful poems to rediscover. Like living men mov’d slowly through my mindīy day and were the trouble of my dreams. Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields īut huge and mighty Forms that do not live There, in her mooring-place, I left my Bark,Īnd, through the meadows homeward went, with graveĪnd serious thoughts and after I had seen With trembling hands I turn’d,Īnd through the silent water stole my way With measur’d motion, like a living thing, Rose up between me and the stars, and still, I struck, and struck againĪnd, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff When from behind that craggy Steep, till then
Went heaving through the water, like a Swan