 | Born: April 7, 1770 // Died: April 23, 1850
 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.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. Together they published anonymously "Lyrical Ballads" in 1978. It contained "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and 3 other poems by Colderige.
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.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The World is Too Much With Us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathиd horn.
by William Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
by William Wordsworth
A Poet! He Hath Put His Heart to School
A poet!--He hath put his heart to school,
Nor dares to move unpropped upon the staff
Which art hath lodged within his hand--must laugh
By precept only, and shed tears by rule.
Thy Art be Nature; the live current quaff,
And let the groveller sip his stagnant pool,
In fear that else, when Critics grave and cool
Have killed him, Scorn should write his epitaph.
How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold?
Because the lovely little flower is free
Down to its root, and, in that freedom, bold;
And so the grandeur of the Forest-tree
Comes not by casting in a formal mould,
But from its own divine vitality.
by William Wordsworth
To submit more poems of Elizabeth Bishop, please click here.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Source:
William Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes (1807). See The Manuscript of William Wordsworth's Poems, in Two Volumes (1807): A Facsimile (London: British Library, 1984). bib MASS (Massey College Library, Toronto). First Publication Date: 1807
William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1800). No. 5, 1 (c.1,2), 2(c.1) (Victoria College Library, Toronto). First Publication Date: 1800.
William Wordsworth, Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems (London: Longman, 1835). B-10 4884 Fisher Rare Book Library (Toronto). First Publication Date: 1835.
|  |
LOADING