Assignment Paper no.105 ( History of English Literature - from 1350 to 1900 )

• Name :- Payal Bambhaniya

• Batch :- M.A. Sem. 1 ( 2022 - 2024 )

• Roll no. :- 16

• Paper no. & Name :- 105 - History of English Literature - from 1350 to 1900

• Assignment Topic:- William Wordsworth as Romantic poet 

• Subject code no.:- 22396

• Enrollment no.:- 4069206420220002

• Email Id :- payalbambhaniya92@gmail.com

• Submitted to.:- Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English, MKBU.

Introduction of  The Romantic Age:-

The Romantic period ( 1789 - 1837 ) has started with the Publication of 'Lyrical Ballads' by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, both were the prominent poets of the age and they have proved that it was "The second creative period of English Literature". The first half of the 19th century records the triumph of Romanticism in literature and democracy in government. The age was also known as "An age of Revolution" there were three revolts going together, Anglo Saxon period of freedom, American commonwealth and French Revolution. All these movements brought the term 'Individualism' and people started thinking in different ways. The chief subject of romantic literature was the essential nobleness of common men and the value of the individual. In the period there were so many writers and poets  presenting their individual point of view and viewing the world with their own perspective. There were two major poets of the age William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Other poets are as below.

• Walter Scott
• Robert Southey
• George Gordon Byron
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• John Keats

William Wordsworth ( 1770 - 1850 ):-

Life of William Wordsworth:-

William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet. He was born in 1770 at cockermouth, Cumberland and spent his seventeen years in Cumberland Hill's; His mother died when he was eight years old and the orphan was taken in charge by relatives, in school he used to learn with flowers and hills rather than classes; in 1787 he went to Cambridge. It was the time of stress and Strom with his life it was like a period of uncertainty. He started writing from 1797 to 1799 a very short period but very important in his life and for the romantic period, and from 1799 he had taken retirement from his work of writing and spent time in between the nature at Northern lake region where he was born, he was very close to the nature which experience has reflected in all his poetry. 

The Great Decade: 1797 - 1808 

While living with Dorothy at Alfoxden House, Wordsworth became friends with a fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They formed a partnership that would change both poet's lives and alter the course of English poetry. The partnership between Wordsworth and Coleridge, rooted in one marvelous year in which they "together wantoned in wild poesy" had two consequences for Wordsworth. First it turned him away from the long poems on which he had laboured since his Cambridge days. These included poems of social protest like Salisbury plain, loco - descriptive poems such as an Evening walk and Descriptive sketches, and the Borderers, a blank - verse tragedy exploring the psychology of guilt. Stimulated  by Coleridge and under the healing influences of nature and his sister, Wordsworth began in 1797 - 98 to compose the short lyrical and dramatic poems for which he is best remembered by many readers. Some of these were affectionate tributes to Dorothy, some were tributes to "Nature's holy plan," and some were portraits of simple rural people intended to illustrate basic truths of human nature.

Poetry of Wordsworth:-

William Wordsworth is best known for Lyrical Ballads, co- written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He is in favour of simple poetic diction but he himself has not followed his own rule, his poetries are easy to read but not to understand, reader could get the pleasure but not the hidden meaning. Wordsworth was strongly believed that man and nature should be portrayed as they are. He is not always melodies, but he is seldom graceful. He is absolutely without humour. His Notable poems are as below.

• I wandered lonely as Cloud
• The Solitary Reaper
• To a Skylark
• The Rime of Ancient Mariner
• London
• The Prelude
• The World is Too Much with Us
• The Recluse

Lyrical Ballads:-

Lyrical Ballads is most famous work of William Wordsworth. Lyrical Ballads, with a few other poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it become and remains a landmark, changing the course of English and poetry. Most of the poems in the 1798 edition were written by Wordsworth, with Coleridge contributing only four poems to the collection, including one of his most famous works, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  In the Preface of Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth explain about what is poet. 

What is poet :-

"Poetry is Man speaking to men, endowed with more lively Sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human being nature, and a more comprehensive soul, who rejoices, more than other men in the spirit of life, habitually impelled to creative volitions, passions and situations where he does not find them."

So what is poet is man speaking to men. Which means poet although the Romantics place a lot of importance on the inherent talent within a person to come up with poetry that kind of a talent is missing in general people but a poet is a person who certainly does not come from any other planet, he is a man speaking to men and then we will find in continuance this observation. Now this is what Wordsworth has to say about what is a poet so the entity called poet is such a human being who is overall in degree a far better human being than ordinary human being.

A second edition was published in 1800, in which Wordsworth including additional poems and a preface detailing the Pair's avowed poetical principles. For another edition, published in 1802, Wordsworth added an appendix titled poetic Diction in which he expanded the ideas set forth in the preface. A third edition was published in 1802, with a substantial edition  published in 1805.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud:-

I Wandered Lonely as clouds are known as "Daffodils". It is a lyrical poem by William Wordsworth. It is one of his most popular and was inspired by a forest encounter on 15 April, 1802 between he, his younger sister Dorothy and a "Long Belt" of Daffodils. Written in 1804, it was first published in 1807 in poems, in Two Volumes, and as a revision in 1815. The poem is based on one of Wordsworth's own walks in the countryside of England's lake District. In the poem, these daffodils have a long - lasting effect on the speaker, firstly in the immediate impression they make and secondly in the way that the image of them comes back to the speaker's mind later on. "I wandered lonely as cloud" is a quintessentially Romantic poem, bringing together key ideas about imagination, humanity and the natural world.

After his longer works his first good book as per critics was selection with short poems, after reading these poems we come to know that Wordsworth is the greatest nature poet that ever has been produced by our literature. No other poet has described. He had a strong belief that all nature is the reflection of the living God, all his contemporary writers like Cowper, Burns, Keats, and Tennyson were providing the out ward aspects of nature in varying degrees but Wordsworth gives you her very life, and the experience of man with the nature. While reading his poetry the reader could feel the touch of nature, the experience of wonderland and memory of our own childhood. 

Wordsworth on Man, on Nature, and on Human life :-

On Man, on Nature, and on Human life, the triple phrase is familiar to us all as the theme of Wordsworth's vast projected poem" The Recluse". Wordsworth's philosophy towards human life is very simple that man is not apart from nature, but is the very "life of her life". Wordsworth has connected birth nature and he expressed this gladness with poetry that the child comes straight from the creator of nature:

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

But trailing cloud of glory do we come

From God, who is our home"

These lines are from William Wordsworth's highly philosophical poem "Ode: Intimation of Immortality" from recollections of Early Childhood. While accounting for the loss of the childhood vision in Manhood, the poet refers to the transition of the human soul from heaven to Earth.  No other poet ever found such abundant beauty in the common world. He had not only sight, but insight, that is he not only sees clearly and describes accurately, but penetrates to the heart of things and always finds some exquisite meaning that is not written on the surface. It is idle to specify or to quote lines on flowers or stars, on snow or vapour. Nothing is ugly or commonplace in his world; on the contrary, there is hardly one natural phenomenon which he has not glorified by pointing out some beauty that was hidden from our eyes.

The truth of Humanity, that is, the common life which labour and loves and shares the general heritage of smiles and tears, is the only subject of permanent literary interest. Burns and the early poets of the Revival began the good work of showing the romantic interest of common life; and Wordsworth continued it in 'Michael', 'The Solitary Reaper ', 'To a Highland Girl', 'Stepping Westward', The Excursion, and a score of lesser poems. Joy and sorrow, not of princes or heroes, but 'in widest commonalty spread' , are his themes; and the hidden purpose of many of his poems is to show that the keynote of all life is happiness not an occasional thing, the result of chance or circumstance, but a heroic thing, to be won, as one would win any other success, by work and patience.

In 1843 Wordsworth was named poet Laureate of England, though by this time he had for the most part quit composing verse. He revised and rearranged his poems, published various editions, and entertained literary guests and friends. When he died in 1850, he had for some years been venerated as a sage, his most ardent detractors glossing over the radical origins of his poetics and politics.

Conclusion:-

Thus, we can say that Throughout his life Wordsworth remained a true interpreter of nature to humanity. It is comforting to know that his life, noble, sincere, never contradicted his message. Poetry was his life, his soul was in all his work; and only by reading what he has written can we understand the Man.

Thank you for reading this Assignment.

Word count:-  1,810

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References:-

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Lyrical Ballads". Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 Jan. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lyrical-Ballads. Accessed 6 November 2022.

Howard, James. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC, 23 Jan 2019. Web. 6 Nov 2022.

McFarland, Thomas. “Wordsworth on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 21, no. 4, 1982, pp. 601–18. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/25600396. Accessed 6 Nov. 2022.

W. J. Long, English Literature. Sahitya Sarowar.

Parrish, Stephen Maxfield. "William Wordsworth". Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 Aug. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wordsworth. Accessed 6 November 2022.