英美文学选读学习笔记 William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the family of an attorney. He was first educated at the Grammar School of Hawkshead, near his birthplace, and then at St. John's College, Cambridge. He developed a keen love of nature as a youth, and during school vacation periods he frequently visited places noted for their scenic beauty. A walking tour of the Swiss Alps made in the Cambridge long vacation of 1790 heightened Wordsworth's exhilarated response to the grandeur of nature. A more important influence on his life was the French Revolution, with which his heart was stirred and his imagination fired. It seemed to him a new dawn of freedom was breaking on the world. He crossed the Channel and lived through the storm and stress of the Revolution for over a year. There he also had a love affair with Annette Vallon who bore him a daughter shortly before his return to England. Disheartened by the outbreak of hostilities between France and Britain in 1793, Wordsworth nevertheless remained sympathetic to the French cause. But in the following years, the Jacobin terror and the French invasion of other European countries fully revealed that the desire for Liberty had been swallowed up by the desire for Empire. Wordsworth was totally disillusioned, and gradually changed into a conservative in politics. However, the formative influence of his early experience of wild nature still remained.

Without a regular job, Wordsworth had always run into financial difficulties, but they were eased for a time when in 1795 he received a bequest of ￡900 from a close friend. Thereupon he and his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, went to live in Raeedown, Dorsetshire. In 1797 Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the two poets became very good friends. They collaborated on a book of poems end Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798. Then Wordsworth and his sister, and Coleridge made a trip to Germany in 1798 and .1799. Returning to England, William and his sister settled at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, Westmoreland, the loveliest spot in the English Lake District. The poet Robert Southey as well as Coleridge lived nearby, and the three men became known as the "Lake Poets." In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, who is portrayed in the charming lyric as "a Phantom of Delight."

In 1813 Wordsworth obtained a sinecure as distributor of stamps for Westmoreland with a substantial annual income. In the same year the Wordsworths moved to Rydal Mount, a few kilometers from Dove Cottage, and there the poet spent the remainder of his life, except for periodic travels. In his later years, his position as a great poet was firmly established. In 1842 he received a government pension, and in the following year he succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate. Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount, April 23, 1850, and was buried in the Grasmere churchyard.

Wordsworth had a long poetic career. His first volumes (Descriptive Sketches, an Evening Walk, 1793) were written in the tradition of the 18th-century feeling for natural description. But the Lyrical Ballads differs in marked ways from his early poetry, notably the uncompromising simplicity of much of the language, the strong sympathy not merely with the poor in general but with particular, dramatized examples of them, and the fusion of natural description with exssions of inward states of mind. The poems Wordsworth added to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads are among the best of his achievements. The Prelude, which began in the 1790s, was completed in 1805 and, after substantial revision, published posthumously in 1850. Many critics rank it as Wordsworth's greatest work. In 1807 Poems in Two Volumes was published. The work contains much of Wordsworth's finest verse, notably the superb "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," the autobiographical narrative "Resolution and Independence," and many of his well-known sonnets. And The Excursion was published in 1814. As he advanced in age, Wordsworth's poetic vision and inspiration dulled; his later more rhetorical and moralistic poems cannot be compared to the lyrics of his youth, although a number of them are illumined by the spark of his former greatness.

According to the subjects, Wordsworth's short poems can be classified into two groups: poems about nature and poems about human life. Wordsworth is regarded as a "worshipper of nature." He can penetrate to the heart of things and give the reader the very life of nature. Poems like "The Sparrow's Nest," "To a Skylark," "To the Cuckoo" and "To a Butterfly" are just a few examples to show his genuine love for the natural beauty. Other poems, such as "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," "An Evening Walk," "My Heart own sublime communion with all things, nature becomes an inspiring force of rapture, a power that reveals the workings of the soul. To Wordsworth, nature acts as a substitute for imaginative and intellectual engagement with the development of embodied human beings in their spanerse circumstances.  It's nature that gives him  "strength and knowledge full of peace."

Wordsworth thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest. The joys and sorrows of the common people are his themes. His sympathy always goes to the suffering poor. When we read poems like: "The Thorn," "The Sailor's Mother," "Michael," "The Affliction of Margaret," and "The Old Cumberland Beggar," we find ourselves in the sence of poverty, crime, insanity, ruined innocence, solitary anguish, and even despair. The "Lucy poems“ describe with rare elusive beauty of simple lyricism and haunting rhythm a young country girl living a simple life in a remote village far from the civilized world. They are verses of love and loss which hold within their delicate simplicity a meditation on time and death which rises to universal stature. In "The Idiot Boy," the irrational mind sees more deeply into the nature of life than the commonsensical. And the poem, "Michael," however, most assuredly suggests the grave and tender dignity of Wordsworth's meditations on "man, the heart of man, and human life." "The Solitary Reaper" and "To a Highland Girl" use rural figures to suggest the timeless mystery of sorrowful humanity and its radiant beauty. The old man in "The Old Cumberland Beggar," living "in the eye of Nature," is seen as cious for his unique self and the benevolence he evokes in the small rural community. The hapless wife of "The Ruined Cottage," dying amid the disintegration of her entire way of life, rouses in the reader the tender, quiet compassion of those who are at one with the timeless truths of existence. In its daring use of subject matter and sense of the authenticity of the experience of the poorest, "Resolution and Independence" is the triumphant conclusion of ideas first developed in the Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth is a poet in memory of the past. To him, life is a cyclical journey. Its beginning finally turns out to be its end. His philosophy of life is sented in his masterpiece The Prelude.  It opens with a literal journey whose goal is to return to the Vale of Grasmere. The journey goes through the poet's personal history, carrying the metaphorical meaning of his interior journey and questing for his lost early self and the proper spiritual home. The poem charts this growth from infancy to manhood. We are shown the development of human consciousness under the sway of an imagination united to the grandeur of nature. Later books of The Prelude describe Wordsworth's experiences in France his republicanism, his affair with Annette Vallon, his "substantial dread" during the Terror and his continuing support of the ideals underlying the Revolution. The concluding description of the ascent of Snowdon becomes a symbol of the poet's climb to the height of his inspired powers and to that state of vision in which, dedicating himself to humanity, he becomes one of the "Prophets of nature."

Wordsworth's deliberate simplicity and refusal to decorate the truth of experience produced a kind of pure and profound poetry which no other poet has ever equaled: In defense of his unconventional theory of poetry, Wordsworth wrote a "Preface" to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, which appeared in 1800 (actual date of publication, 1801). His mise was that the source of poetic truth is the direct experience of the senses. Poetry, he asserted, originates from "emotion recollected in tranquility." Rejecting the contemporary emphasis on form and an intellectual approach that drained poetic writing of strong emotion, he maintained that the scenes and events of everyday life and the speech of ordinary people were the raw material of which poetry could and should be made.

William Wordsworth is the leading figure of the English romantic poetry, the focal poetic voice of the period. His is a voice of searchingly com hensive humanity and one that inspires his audience to see the world freshly, sympathetically and naturally. The most important contribution he has made is that he has not only started the' modern poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self, but also changed the course of English poetry by using ordinary speech of the language and by advocating a return to nature.