Introduction

Lyrical Ballads, a collaborative effort published anonymously in 1798, is far from the greatest volume of English-language poetry of the last several hundred years. But because of the theory of poetry and its vital sources that lay behind the book's composition--as that theory was famously articulated by the volume's principal author, William Wordsworth, in the Preface to a new edition two years later--Lyrical Ballads is arguably the most important and influential volume of poetry between Milton's Paradise Lost in 1667 and Whitman's Leaves of Grass in 1855. And in the immediately succeeding years, in a burst of genius that seemed to vanish as abruptly as it had commenced, Wordsworth would go on to produce a body of work that established him not only as one of the greatest poets of the Romantic period, but as one of the greatest poets in the entire history of English literature.

Early Years

William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, a little town in Cumberland, England, in the northern part of the Lake District, the second of five children of John Wordsworth and Ann (Cookson) Wordsworth. Cockermouth was largely controlled by the wealthy landowner Sir James Lowther, for whose family Wordsworth's father was legal agent, and the Wordsworths lived in a large house owned by the Lowthers. When very young, William spent long periods with his mother's family in Penrith, and his earliest education was divided between local grammar schools in Penrith and Cockermouth. John Wordsworth encouraged his children to read from a very young age, introducing them to the great English poets, and William memorized long passages from Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. In 1778, Wordsworth's mother became ill with pneumonia; after her death in early March, the children were dispersed among various relatives, and Wordsworth did not see his only sister, Dorothy, again for nine years. In May 1779, Wordsworth and his older brother Richard began their studies at the prestigious Hawkshead Grammar School in Furness, Lancashire, whose pupils received an education, including a thorough grounding in the classics, that often put them well ahead of their classmates when they entered Cambridge. Richard and William boarded, as their two younger brothers and a cousin would also do, with a middle-aged couple, Hugh Tyson, a carpenter, and his wife Ann, a domestic servant. During school terms for the next eight years, the Tysons' home would be Wordsworth's as well, and he spent many happy hours with the Tysons and in explorations of the surrounding countryside.

When Wordsworth and his brothers returned home for the Christmas holidays in 1783, they found their father seriously ill as a result of having spent an entire night outdoors after getting lost on the way home from a business assignment. Although only forty-two years old, he succumbed to his illness and died on December 30. The Wordsworth children now came under the legal guardianship of two uncles. In addition to the shock of this second bereavement, they also discovered the extent of the local animosity against their father as a representative of the despised Lowthers, who now considerably worsened the family situation by refusing to honor a claim for more than £4,000 of John Wordsworth's unpaid salary and expenses. It was not until after the death of Sir James Lowther, nearly twenty years later, that his heirs paid the claim, with interest.

The value of Wordsworth's Hawkshead training was displayed in 1787, when his entrance examination to St. John's College of Cambridge University placed him in the first class among entering freshmen and showed him to be a full year ahead of his fellows in mathematics. It was his uncles' hope that he would enter the church, an unlikely prospect in light of his intense dislike of compulsory chapel. He was also inattentive to his studies, and by his sophomore year he had been dropped to the second class. He showed much more interest in reading modern English and European literature that was not available to him in the curriculum, in writing his own poetry, and in a fourteen-week walking tour of France and Switzerland that he took in the summer of 1790 with a Welsh friend, Robert Jones. By the end of his college career, his academic performance had fallen off to such an extent that he qualified for no academic honors and was able to earn only a pass degree.

After spending the summer of 1791 in London, Wordsworth returned to France toward the end of the year. That nation was then in the early stages of its revolution. Wordsworth befriended a French army officer named Michel Beaupuy, from whom he received confirmation of his support for the principles of the revolution and his opposition to hierarchical social systems that bred inequality and poverty. He also (a fact that was not discovered and made public until 1916) had an affair with a young woman named Annette Vallon, who gave birth to their daughter, Caroline, on December 15, 1792, about six weeks after Wordsworth's return to England. At the time, he intended to return and marry Annette, but there were many obstacles in the lovers' path: she was Catholic and belonged to a strongly monarchist family, while he was a republican and, loosely speaking, a Protestant; reunion became all but impossible in 1793, when England declared war on France. With the passing of time, the urgency of his feelings weakened--although he continued to provided financial support for his child, and an unusually high number of wronged and abandoned women appear in the pages of his poetry.

With England positioning itself as the foe of progressivism and France betraying the revolution by its descent into the Reign of Terror, Wordsworth felt doubly alienated. He came to know a number of radical politicians and thinkers, among them William Godwin, whose philosophy of rationalism briefly intrigued him, although in the end he could not endorse its discounting of the emotional side of human nature. In 1795, thanks in part to a legacy from a wealthy young man whom he had nursed in his last illness, Wordsworth was able to establish a home in Racedown, Dorset, with his sister, Dorothy. Having been apart through so much of their childhood, they became quite close as adults, and shared a household, even after his marriage, until his death more than half a century later.

Literary Career

In 1793, Wordsworth published his first two books of verse, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. Each was a longish poem in heroic couplets, the dominant English verse form of the eighteenth century. Essentially backward-looking in style and sensibility, they were false starts for a radical thinker who would soon also be the most revolutionary poet of the time. A decisive turning point for Wordsworth came in the city of Bristol in the late summer of 1795, when

He met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a twenty-two-year-old fellow poet and radical, who already knew and admired Wordsworth's poetry. Coleridge passed on to Wordsworth his enthusiasm for the associationist philosophy of David Hartley, which held that the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual elements of human nature are formed by our earliest sense impressions, that character is a function of environment. This view, whose most succinct statement occurs in Wordsworth's "My heart leaps up when I behold," led both young men to resolve to spend their lives and raise their children in the beautiful and wholesome atmosphere of the countryside, rather than in congested and dispiriting cities.

Wordsworth and Coleridge corresponded for the next two years, and in July of 1797 Wordsworth and Dorothy leased a cottage at Alfoxden, largely because Coleridge was then living only three miles away. In daily contact for the next twelve months--Coleridge later described Wordsworth, Dorothy, and himself during this period as "three persons and one soul"--the two poets read and commented on one another's work, and developed and exchanged theories of poetry. They began to plan a joint volume of verse, in which Coleridge would treat of the supernatural in natural terms, while Wordsworth would present the natural and ordinary in a fresh way, "to excite," as Coleridge later said, "a feeling analogous to the supernatural by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom and directing it to the loveliness and the wonder of the world before us."

The resulting volume, Lyrical Ballads, appeared anonymously in 1798. It contained "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and three other poems by Coleridge, and nineteen poems by Wordsworth, all of them unlike his earlier work. Intended as experiments, they were written in a simple, direct style and focused on simple, rural protagonists. The results were uneven, ranging from successful exercises like "Lines Written in Early Spring" and "Expostulation and Reply" to bathetic-- and at times quasi-imbecilic--performances like "The Idiot Boy" and "Goody Blake and Harry Gill." Wordsworth's one truly great contribution to the volume was the last to be written, "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," a sophisticated and meditative poem in blank verse unlike anything else in the book. Two years later, considerably revised, Lyrical Ballads was reissued, with a second volume of new poems written entirely by Wordsworth and, more important, with his famous Preface. In this document, he rejected the brittle urban sensibility and affected diction of eighteenth-century verse, and called instead for a new poetry, seeking, as he described the principles that had motivated Lyrical Ballads, "to choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect." Among the new poems were the long blank-verse pastoral "Michael" and the enigmatic series of "Lucy" lyrics, including "A Slumber Did My Spirit Steal."

In September 1798, shortly before the first publication of Lyrical Ballads, the lease on the Alfoxden cottage expired, and William and Dorothy accompanied Coleridge to Germany. After they visited Hamburg, Coleridge went on to the University of Göttingen, while the Wordsworths passed a lonely and bitterly cold winter at Goslar. Here, cut off from his usual scenes and sources of inspiration, Wordsworth worked on The Prelude, a long autobiographical poem (ultimately more than 8500 lines) that he had begun early in 1798. Subtitled "Growth of a Poet's Mind," this work sought to trace its author's intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development, through descriptions of significant experiences and stages from his early childhood through his young manhood. After completing this masterful and original work in 1805, he continued to revise it (and, in the opinion of many, to weaken it) off and on through the rest of his life, before its first publication some months after his death. Back in England in the spring, Wordsworth and Dorothy settled at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, in the Lake District, where--with several changes of residence until their last home, Rydal Mount--they would remain for the rest of their lives. With Dorothy, he made an extended visit to France in August 1802 to see Annette Vallon and their daughter, Caroline. In October of that year, Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, who had been his classmate in the Penrick grammar school. Their marriage would produce five children, two of whom would die very young in 1812.

This period, roughly 1798-1805, was also the time of Wordsworth's greatest achievement as a poet, in works more complex in thought and feeling and more wide-ranging in expression than those of the Lyrical Ballads. In addition to The Prelude, he wrote the lyric poems "My Heart Leaps Up" and "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"; the sonnets "The World Is Too Much with Us," "Composed upon Westminster Bridge," and "It Is a Beauteous Evening"; the narrative "Resolution and Independence"; and one of the imperishable glories of English poetry, the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," which describes its speaker's transition from a mystical and ecstatic sense of oneness with nature (which to Wordsworth always represented a oneness with the divine) to a more philosophical maturity, in which his awareness of separateness and eventual death is softened by continuing love for nature and his fellow humans.

After the death of his father's employer, Wordsworth healed his differences with the Lowther family, through whom he was given the sinecure of Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland. He settled into domestic and financial security, poetic fame (although he would be the butt of often vicious parodies by Byron, Shelley, and others), and a reversal of his political opinions into conservative and ultimately reactionary stances that provoked dismay and outrage among former supporters. He continued to write prolifically, but largely without inspiration, producing sonnet sequences on such subjects as the death penalty and the history of Christianity in England, and often employing the very sort of stale and "elevated" diction against which he had so effectively inveighed at the beginning of the century. Lacking in humor, he was therefore essentially lacking in self-criticism. The only subject that seemed capable of stirring his former genius was the death of loved ones. His brother John's death in a shipwreck in 1805 provoked "Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle," in which he painfully admits the limitations of his earlier view of nature as endlessly gentle and beatific. That poem concluded with the line "Not without hope, we suffer and we mourn," but no hope relieved the bleak agony of the sonnet "Surprised by Joy," written in response to death of his three-year-old daughter Catherine. The late "Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg" lamented the passing of Hogg and of several other poets, including Coleridge, with whom Wordsworth had quarrelled in 1810 and from whom he had been largely estranged until shortly before Coleridge's death in 1834.

Last Years And Legacy

In 1842, Wordsworth resigned his position as distributor of stamps, and was granted a Civil List pension of £300 a year. The ultimate confirmation of his respectability and conventionality came in the following year, when he was appointed Poet Laureate after the death of his friend Robert Southey. In his last years, he suffered many private pains through the deaths of family members--his wife's last surviving sister in 1843, their four-year-old grandson in 1845, his last surviving brother and another brother's son in 1846. The worst blow came in 1847, when his beloved daughter Dora died at forty-three from a flare-up of previously dormant tuberculosis. Wordsworth was so staggered by this loss that for a time his own survival was cause for concern. The death of Dora killed his spirit, and his body followed on April 23, 1850, sixteen days after his eightieth birthday.

Wordsworth's importance as an innovator is enormous. As would his modernist heirs a century later, he appeared at a time of outworn traditions and exhausted conventions, and refreshed the current of poetry by reminding his contemporaries of its need to renew itself in both content and manner of expression. His radical experiments in poetic simplicity remain more important for the theories behind them than for their actual poetic accomplishment, but the best of the works that he produced in the years immediately after Lyrical Ballads, few though they may be in the vast bulk of his collected poetry, ensure him a permanent place not only in literary history but in the hearts of all who value the highest artistic achievements that humanity is capable of.