19th Century British Poetry

William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the north of England’s Lake District, and was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge. A walking tour of Europe in his early twenties brought him into contact with the first throes of the French Revolution, whose ideals he supported until the onset of the Terror. Upon his return to England, he settled with his sister, Dorothy, in the Lake District, where, apart from some few brief travels, he remained for the rest of his life. In 1795 he met the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he published Lyrical Ballads (1798), one of the most important works in the history of English literature, both for its innovative poetry and for Wordsworth’s preface to its second edition (1800). In his later years Wordsworth grew increasingly conservative, and many former devotees accused him of apostasy, but his poetry remained both popular and influential – so influential and so formative of modern ideas about poetry that the scope of his achievement is easily overlooked. In his preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth attacks the poetic diction and elaborate figures of speech characteristic of eighteenth-century poetry, asserting that he had “taken as much pains to avoid it as others take to produce it,” and advocating the “language really used by men.” He rejected the notion of a poetic hierarchy ranking epic and tragedy over the subjective mode of lyric; declared “incidents and situations from common life” as fit subjects for art; and substituted sincerity for studied artifice. The accessibility of Wordsworth’s poetry and his “democratizing” theory should not divert attention from his painstaking and complex technique. Many of his poems are written in strict and elaborate forms, or blank verse; their effect might be one of spontaneity, but it results from careful construction. Wordsworth ascribed to art the duty of cultivating emotional and moral response in an increasingly desensitized age, one more interested in titillation than meditation.

From: The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 4th Edition.