William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a poet, born at Cockermouth, of a Yorkshire stock. He was educated at Hawkshead Grammar School and at St. John's College, Cambridge. He travelled in France at the Revolution period, and was smitten with the Republican fever, which however soon spent itself. He established himself in the south of England, and fell in with Coleridge, and visited Germany in company with him, and on his return settled in the Lake Country.

Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, who had been a school-fellow of his, and to whom he was attached when a boy, and received a lucrative sinecure appointment as distributor of stamps in the district, took up his residence first at Grasmere and finally at Rydal Mount, devoting his life in best of the Muses, as he deemed, to the composition of poetry, with all faith in himself, and slowly but surely bringing round his admirers to the same conclusion. He began his career in literature by publishing along with Coleridge "Lyrical Ballads".

Wordsworth finished his "Prelude" in 1806, and produced his "Excursion" in 1814, after which, from his home at Rydal Mount, there issued a long succession of miscellaneous pieces. He succeeded Southey as poet-laureate in 1843. He is emphatically the poet of external nature and of its all-inspiring power, and it is as such his admirers regard him. Carlyle compares his muse to "an honest rustic fiddle, good and well handled, but wanting two or more of the strings, and not capable of much". To judge of Wordsworth's merits as a poet the student is referred to Matthew Arnold's "Selections".

Wisdom & Quotes

• That best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
- Tintern Abbey

• I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity.
- Tintern Abbey

• Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.

- Tintern Abbey

• Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The soul that rises with us, our life's Star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
- Intimations of Immortality

• The child is father of the man.

- My Heart Leaps Up

• And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.
- My Heart Leaps Up

• My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky.
- My Heart Leaps Up

• 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.
- I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

• The good die first,

And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust
Burn to the socket.
- The Excursion

• Wisdom is of times nearer when we stoop

Than when we soar.
- The Excursion

• 'Tis said that some have died for love.

- 'Tis said that some have died

• My apprehensions come in crowds;

I dread the rustling of the grass;
The very shadows of the clouds
Have power to shake me as they pass:
I question things and do not find
One that will answer to my mind;
And all the world appears unkind.
- The Affliction of Margaret

• She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.
- Ruth

• Plain living and high thinking are no more.

- written in London, Sept 1802

• Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

- Lyrical Ballads, Preface to 2nd edition

• We poets in our youth begin in gladness;

But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
- Resolution and Independence

• A primrose by a river's brim

A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.
- Peter Bell

• Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark,

And shares the nature of infinity.
- The Borderers

• One impulse from a vernal wood

May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
- The Tables Turned

• Who is this happy warrior? Who is he

That every man in arms should wish to be?
- Character of the Happy Warrior

• 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.
- The World Is Too Much With Us

• Bliss it was that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!
- The French Revolution

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel