William Wordsworth
1770-1850
Meeting Wordsworth in 1815,
Byron told his wife that he had "but one feeling . .. reverence!"
The exemplar of "plain
living and high thinking," Wordsworth provided an image of poetry
and "the Poet" as at once humble and exalted, domestic and
severly moral. By the end of his life had become a cultural institution,
respected even by those who opposed his politics. Admirers made pilgrimages
to his home at Rydal Mount in the Lake District.
His beginnings were less
auspicious. Born in the Lake District, Wordsworth was the son of
the steward of Lord Lonsdale, the dominant landowner of the beautiful
but isolated region.
The death of Wordsworth's
mother when he was eight years old broke a stable middle-class family
life; Williams and his three brothers were sent to Hawkshead to
school, and his sister Dorothy send to live with various distant
relatives.
His father died five
years later, . . . "The props of my affection were removed/And
yet the building stood," Wordsworth exclaimed in a passage
of the Prelude that readers have taken to refer obliquely
to these early losses and separations; "taught to feel, perhaps
too much,'The self-sufficing power of Solitude," Wordsworth
developed a potent myth of himself as a "favoured being"
shaped by the severe but mysteriously benevolent ministry of Nature.
- The complete biography
of William Wordsworth begins on page 312 of The Longman
Anthology of British Literature.
Text and notes
taken from The Longman Anthology of Britsh Literature copyright ©1999
by Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers, Inc.
Site copyright© 2001 Joan Bahamonde, George Justice, and Susan
Soto
