WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Grammar school then Cambridge University. After graduation he travelled to France where his
sympathies were for the revolutionary movement. When the revolution turned to tyranny, he
suffered intense disillusionment and became conservative. In 1979 he began his friendship with
Coleridge, which brought to the creation of Lyrical ballads. He was made poet Laureate.
Themes:
 Nature= -countryside opposed to town; -source of feelings, joy=man part of nature as a result of
the emotional response it produces in him; -active force, mysterious and wonderful power of the
universe which deserves piety=religious reverence and love
 Childhood=Rousseau’s ideas of a child as a man close to the ideal state of nature and
uncorrupted. It is the time when man is closest to God and can feel the glorious splendour of the
natural world around him. Adults can only feel the light of common day, because their relationship
with nature is changed.
 Imagination=capacity of colouring, that is to modify the object observed, having a special
intuition or insight, to let the poet see things not seen by an ordinary mind.
 Poetry =spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, taking origins from emotion recollected in
tranquillity, talking about common life. Poet as a man speaking to men with a superior ability to
feel deeply, to respond to nature and to articulate thoughts and feelings. He has to teach men to
enter in communion with nature
 Like Blake: radicalism, visionary philosophising, reverence for the power of imagination,
sympathy for ordinary people and simple language
 Language really used by men
PREFACE TO LYRICAL BALLADS: The Preface is a revolutionary manifesto about the
nature of poetry. Wordsworth’s Preface implicitly denies the traditional assumption that the poetic
genres constitute a hierarchy, from epic and tragedy at the top down through comedy, satire,
pastoral, to the short lyric at the lowest reaches of the poetic scale; he also rejects the traditional
principle of “decorum”, according to which the subject matter (especially the social class of the
protagonists) and the level of diction are contrived by the poet to conform to the status of the
literary kind on the poetic scale. “The principal object […] was to choose incidents and
situations from common life.”; so, poetry has to deal with everyday situations and “humble and
rustic life” and simple people living in the countryside (not in town), because they are in contact
with nature. Our elementary feelings and passions can grow better in a field of rural life, which is
built upon elementary feelings, and they may also be contemplated and communicated better than
any other writer at the time. “Describe [those incidents] in a selection of language really used by
men.” The rural men far from social vanity use their language to express feelings in a simple and
unelaborated manner, more in connection with nature, and this language must be as far away as
possible from the “poetic diction”, and purified of any disagreable or disgusting expressions. He
also claims that such a language is more permanent and philosophical because it results from
“repeated experience and regular feelings”. “What is a Poet?...He is a man speaking to
men(…)”. The poet stands apart even though he is equal to others, because he has got a higher
degree of sensibility and imaginative capacity he is, in fact, he can reach the very essence of
things and try to communicate it in a simple language, and he can be considered a moral teacher
because he wants to purify men’s emotions through describing such objects to excite these
feelings.“Throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things
should be presented to the mind in an unusual way.” Imagination was to pay a very important
role, identified with its capacity of colouring things, to modify the objects observed, and to show
them in an unusual aspect. Through imagination, the poet can see things the ordinary minds can’t,
the eye of the soul seeing farther and deeper than the eyes of the mind. “Make these incidents and
situations interesting by tracing in them the primary laws of our nature.”(…)The poet
describes natural and simple objects, quiet landscapes, but not through a realistic eye of
observation: he sees all things through the eyes of memory, which recollects emotions already lost.
Since poetry is a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, these feelings are not immediate,
but originated from “emotion recollected in tranquillity”, recreated by the subjectivity of
memory: so, it is not original emotion, but past feelings contemplated and reorganized.
DAFFODILS/I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD The four six-line stanzas(in iambic
tetrameter) of this poem follow a quatrain-couplet rhyme scheme: ABABCC. The speaker says
that, wandering like a cloud above hills and valleys, he encountered a field of daffodils
(hyperbole=ten thousand saw I at a glance) beside a lake. A poet feels happy in such a joyful
company of flowers. He says that he stared, but did not realize the wealth the scene would bring
him. When he feels “vacant” or “pensive,” the memory flashes upon “and his heart fills with
pleasure, “and dances with the daffodils.” The plot is extremely simple, the poet’s discovery of a
field of daffodils by a lake, the memory of which pleases him and comforts him when he is lonely,
bored, or restless. The speaker is compared to a natural object, a cloud and the daffodils are
continually personified as human beings. This technique implies an unity between man and nature.
The flowers imply rebirth, a new beginning for human beings, blessed with the grace of nature.
Their arrival in the month of March is welcome to appreciate them.