WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850).

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH ( )

William Wordsworth Timeline
William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in a fine Georgian house in Cockermouth, now called Wordsworth House. His father John was estate agent to Sir James Lowther, who owned the house. The garden at the back, with the River Derwent flowing past, was a place of magic and adventure for the young William. William has an elder brother Richard, a younger sister Dorothy and two younger brothers John and Christopher.

1778 Wordsworth's mother Ann Cookson Wordsworth dies. William goes to Hawkshead Grammar School. 1783 Father dies. Responsibility for William and his brothers passed to his mother’s brother, Christopher Cookson, an unhappy arrangement for the children, who found their guardian unsympathetic.

From 1779 until 1787 William attended the Grammar School in Hawkshead, lodging with Ann Tyson initially, then with his brothers. At Hawkshead William thrived - receiving encouragement from the headmaster to read and write poetry. During these years he made many visits to the countryside, gaining inspiration as the powers of nature exercised their influence.

1787 Begins University Wordsworth enrolls as a member of St. John's College at Cambridge University. He publishes his first piece of writing, a sonnet in The European Magazine. 1789 An Evening Walk. The young Lady to whom this was addressed was my Sister. It was composed at school, and during my two first College vacations. There is not an image in it which I have not observed.

1790 Walking tour of France, Switzerland, and Germany

1791 Graduates from University. Wordsworth receives his bachelor's degree from Cambridge University. In November, he travels to France and is fascinated by the Republican movement. He was befriended by Michel Beaupuy, through whom he came to share the ideals of the French Revolution. Whilst in Orléans he had an affair with Annette Vallon, who bore him a child.

December 1792 Leaves France before his first daughter is born. Wordsworth runs out of money and is forced to leave France, leaving behind a pregnant Annette Vallon. Vallon later gives birth to the couple's daughter Caroline.

1793 Returns to England to earn money; Anglo-French War prevents his return to France until 1802. In England, he began to give wholehearted support to the radical philosophy of Thomas Paine and William Godwin, openly expressing their ideas in his own poetry.

1793 Begins publishing Wordsworth publishes his first poetry collections, Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk.

1794 Descriptive Sketches. Much the greatest part of this poem was composed during my walks upon the banks of the Loire in the years 1791, I will only notice that the description of the valley filled with mist, beginning--"In solemn shapes," was taken from that beautiful region of which the principal features are Lungarn and Sarnen. Nothing that I ever saw in nature left a more delightful impression on my mind than that which I have attempted, alas! how feebly, to convey to others in these lines.

1795 Moves to Dorset Wordsworth receives a small inheritance from a friend and sets up house in Dorset, England with his sister Dorothy. He meets fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the two become close friends.

1797 Friendship with Coleridge. Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy move closer to Coleridge. For a year, the two poets are in daily contact with one another, a period that proves to be a vital creative period for both of them. Wordsworth produces the poem "Tintern Abbey," and Coleridge writes "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." They collaborate on a groundbreaking collection of poetry.

In March 1798,Wordsworth’s first spring at Alfoxden House in a captivating rural setting overlooking the Bristol Channel, we clearly discern THEMES AND TECHNIQUES evolving toward what is now thought of as quintessentially Wordsworthian.

Such accounts are sharply observed pictures of the natural world, expressed in everyday language. Many of these lyrics record the growth of the speaker’s perceptions as he creates and meditates upon his view of the world.

VISION AND SIGHT Throughout his poems, Wordsworth fixates on vision and sight as the vehicles through which individuals are transformed. As speakers move through the world, they see visions of great natural loveliness, which they capture in their memories. Later, in moments of darkness, the speakers recollect these visions, as in “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Here, the speaker daydreams of former jaunts through nature, which “flash upon that inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude” (21–22). The power of sight captured by our mind’s eye enables us to find comfort even in our darkest, loneliest moments.

Elsewhere, Wordsworth describes the connection between seeing and experiencing emotion, as in “My heart leaps up” (1807), in which the speaker feels joy as a result of spying a rainbow across the sky. Detailed images of natural beauty abound in Wordsworth’s poems, including descriptions of daffodils and clouds, which focus on what can be seen, rather than touched, heard, or felt. In Book Fourteenth of The Prelude, climbing to the top of a mountain in Wales allows the speaker to have a prophetic vision of the workings of the mind as it thinks, reasons, and feels.

It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before, The red-breast sings from the tall larch That stands beside our door. One moment now may give us more Than fifty years of reason; Our minds shall drink at every pore The spirit of the season. And from the blessed power that rolls About, below, above; We’ll frame the measure of our souls, They shall be tuned to love.

Equally characteristic of Wordsworth is that ‘pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind’.
The joy of the Alfoxden spring takes place amidst the poverty and anguish of neighboring common men and women.

The landscape of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads poems is peopled not only by joyful poets of creative natural perceptions but by mad mothers, idiot boys, starving and freezing old women, terrified and despairing convicts, shepherds reduced to public relief, American Indian women abandoned to die.

In the best of these poems, Wordsworth merges his humanitarian concerns with an interest in the psychology not only of the victim but also of the poet-narrator who, interacting with the sufferer, tells the tale.

1798 Lyrical Ballads published. Wordsworth and Coleridge publish Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems written in "language really used by men," free of the "gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers.“ The book sparks the Romantic Age of English literature.

Wordsworth and Coleridge set out to overturn what they considered the priggish, learned and highly sculpted forms of 18th century English poetry and bring poetry within the reach of the average person by writing the verses using normal, everyday language. They place an emphasis on the vitality of the living voice that the poor use to express their reality.

Using this language also helps assert the universality of human emotions. Even the title of the collection recalls rustic forms of art - the word "lyrical" links the poems with the ancient rustic bards and lends an air of spontaneity, while "ballads" are an oral mode of storytelling used by the common people.

In the 'Advertisement' included in the 1798 edition, Wordsworth explained his poetical concept:
“The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure.”

If the experiment with vernacular language was not enough of a departure from the norm, the focus on simple, uneducated country people as the subject of poetry was a signal shift to modern literature. One of the main themes of "Lyrical Ballads" is the return to the original state of nature, in which people led a purer and more innocent existence.

Wordsworth subscribed to Rousseau's belief that humanity was essentially good but was corrupted by the influence of society. This may be linked with the sentiments spreading through Europe just prior to the French Revolution.

Though all of William Wordsworth verses showcase his love for nature, Daffodils, a 24 line poesy, stand out among the rest, and is one of the most sought after poems chosen even for academic curriculums. The poem, talks of the poet’s sighting of a host of daffodils beside a lake. The poet has beautifully portrayed his imagination on the spotting of the dancing daffodils, which are more than a ten thousand, and takes the reader to a stride.

While the poet ends the poem with the note, “And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils”, you will find yourself being floated away like how William started the poem, and that the jocundity it brings along is inexpressible.

The Daffodils opens with the speaker remote from the natural world, as is a cloud that soars distantly above that world. Abruptly, a ‘laughing company’ of daffodils surrounds him. The sparkling waves of Ullswater, the daffodils ‘dancing in the breeze’, the surrounding trees, and even that floating cloud all fuse in a vision of unity that encompasses the poet himself.

But the ultimate importance of that visionary moment becomes apparent to him only years later:
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 feels, And dances with the Daffodils.

MEMORY Memory allows Wordsworth’s speakers to overcome the harshness of the contemporary world. Recollecting their childhoods gives adults a chance to reconnect with the visionary power and intense relationship they had with nature as children. In turn, these memories encourage adults to re-cultivate as close a relationship with nature as possible as an antidote to sadness, loneliness, and despair.

The act of remembering also allows the poet to write: Wordsworth argued in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads that poetry sprang from the calm remembrance of passionate emotional experiences.

Poems cannot be composed at the moment when emotion is first experienced. Instead, the initial emotion must be combined with other thoughts and feelings from the poet’s past experiences using memory and imagination. The poem produced by this time-consuming process will allow the poet to convey the essence of his emotional memory to his readers and will permit the readers to remember similar emotional experiences of their own.

The first edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared in an edition of five hundred copies, with nineteen poems written by Wordsworth and four – including Rime of the Ancient Mariner – by Coleridge.

Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817) recalled that he was to write on ‘persons and characters supernatural’, while Wordsworth would concentrate on subjects from ‘ordinary life’, giving ‘the charm of novelty to things of every day’ and showing ‘the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us . . .’

The reviews are remarkably similar, even down to some of the descriptive adjectives criticizing Wordsworth’s most personal poems: ‘flimsy, puerile thoughts, expressed in such feeble halting verse we have seldom seen’, ‘namby-pamby’ (British Critic); ‘puerile beyond the power of imitation’ (Le Beau Monde); ‘nauseous and nauseating sensibilities to weeds and insects’, ‘false taste and puerile conceit’ (Critical Review); ‘a very paragon of silliness and affectation’, ‘an insult on the public taste’, ‘namby-pamby’ (Edinburgh Review); ‘calculated to excite disgust and anger in a lover of poetry’ (Poetical Register).

The main problem, as Francis Jeffrey wrote in the Edinburgh Review, was Wordsworth’s use of subjects that the ‘greater part of his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting’. The reviewer in The Satirist wondered how anyone could think it worthwhile to write about his memories of some daffodils blowing about in the wind; similarly, the writer for the Annual Review excoriated Wordsworth’s attaching of ‘exquisite emotions’ to objects in which no one else had the slightest interest. The poet, thundered Francis Jeffrey, had openly violated ‘the established laws of poetry’.

Reviewers cited uninteresting subject themes and the unreadability of The Ancient Mariner, with its archaic style and murky philosophical theme. Francis Jeffrey, one of the chief reviewers for the influential Edinburgh Review, was so offended by Wordsworth's flaunting of poetic convention in the Lyrical Ballads that he engaged in a long and vitriolic campaign against what he termed the “Lake School of Poetry.”

Lyrical Ballads (1800) appeared in two volumes,
the first one reissuing – with revisions – Lyrical Ballads (1798) and the second containing a somewhat uneasy mixture of the Grasmere poems of 1800 with the Goslar ones written in 1798–9. The second edition of the book shows Wordsworth’s name as the author.

Paramount among those changes made in the first volume of 1800 was Wordsworth’s addition to it of a critical manifesto, a PREFACE providing a lengthy theoretical justification for the works to follow. Wordsworth’s unshakeable faith in his own greatness and originality created the Preface to Lyrical Ballads to instruct his readers how to read those poems.

Wordsworth defines poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”. He also explains his views on the elements on modern poetry.

This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much 18th-century poetry.

Wordsworth explained in the Preface that he sought to use vernacular language and to write about simple uneducated country people as that, to him, was a more "poetic" and "truthful" language than the more formal poetic diction of his day, which he thought artificial and insufficient to "celebrate" the beauty of the natural world.

He also said: "The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure."

On the 'Subject and Language of Poetry':
MAJOR ARGUMENTS On the 'Subject and Language of Poetry': "The principal object […] was to choose incidents and situations from common life.“ Wordsworth justifies this by adding that 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.

"[D]escribe [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. He also claims that such a language is more permanent and philosophical because it results from "repeated experience and regular feelings".

"[T]hrow over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way.“ "[M]ake these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature."

But in the long view other aspects of his Preface have been no less significant in establishing its importance, not only as a turning point in English criticism but also as a central document in modem culture, Wordsworth feared that a new urban, industrial society's mass media and mass culture were threatening to blunt the human mind's "discriminatory powers“ and to "reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor."

He attributed to imaginative literature the primary role in keeping the human beings who live in such societies emotionally alive and morally sensitive. Literature, that is, could keep humans essentially human.

The Preface also contains his now famous definition of poetry as being,
"the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility".

In his concentration on nature, Wordsworth showed love of nature at its most sublime, of mountains and of wild scenery, and this was in sharp contrast to the view that nature only after it had been manipulated by human hands, such as in landscape gardening, could then be considered a suitable subject for art and poetry.

William, Dorothy and Coleridge then began their voyage to Germany where they encountered a terrible winter in Coleridge soon went his own way and spent much of his time in university towns. Dorothy and William lived in Goslar where Wordsworth began his work on The Prelude and other famous poems such as The Lucy Poems.

1799 Return to the Lake District William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy move back to Lake District and settle in the village of Grasmere. Wordsworth lives in Grasmere for the rest of his life. He has begun work on an autobiographical poem about his experience in France. During his life Wordsworth calls the unpublished work the "poem to Coleridge;" it is later known as The Prelude.

The final edition of the Wordsworth Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805.

1802 Family Matters William and Dorothy Wordsworth travel to France so that Wordsworth can meet his daughter—Caroline—and make arrangements for her support with Annette Vallon. When he returns to England, Wordsworth marries Mary Hutchinson, a schoolmate and longtime friend.

1805 Prelude Finished; Brother Dies Wordsworth finishes his "poem to Coleridge" but refuses to publish it until he has completed The Recluse, a long piece for which the "poem to Coleridge" would be a prologue. William's younger brother, 33-year-old John Wordsworth, dies in a shipwreck.

1807 Poems in Two Volumes. Wordsworth publishes the collection Poems in Two Volumes. The book contains the poem "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." Up to this point Wordsworth was known publicly only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this collection would cement his reputation. Its reception was lukewarm, however.

His sister Dorothy continued to live with Wordsworth, along with his new wife and her sister, Sara Hutchinson. They were often visited by Coleridge, who had moved to the Lake District with his wife, and who had become emotionally involved with Sara Hutchinson.

1810 Wordsworth is growing estranged from Coleridge, who is addicted to opium, and feels burdened by his care. When Coleridge moves out of Wordsworth's home in May and learns that Wordsworth warned a mutual friend against taking him in, he is distraught. The men reconcile a few years later but are never as close as they once were.

1813 Wordsworth Gets a Job Wordsworth is appointed Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, a civil position that pays him a salary of about 400 pounds per year. The family moves to Rydal Mount, the Grasmere home where he lives out the rest of his life.

In 1814 Wordsworth published The Excursion, 9000 lines of poetry in nine volumes, which aroused little interest. He continued to be criticized for his low subjects and ‘simplicity’. Thereafter he became more interested in reworking, ordering and anthologizing his work in various collected editions.

1815 The White Doe of Rylstone. Preface to Lyrical Ballads revised. 1819 Peter Bell and The Waggoner. 1820 We Are Seven and The River Duddon (sonnets).

1822 Ecclesiastical Sketches. 1825 Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems.

1828 Tours the Rhineland with Coleridge.

1829 Dorothy Gets Sick Dorothy Wordsworth comes down with a serious illness that renders her an invalid until her death in 1855. 1834 Samuel Taylor Coleridge dies.

1839 Honorary Degree William Wordsworth receives an honorary degree from Oxford University, to "thunders of applause, repeated over and over." Towards the end of his life, his disillusionment with the French revolution had made him more conservative in outlook. In 1839 he also received a civil pension of £300 a year from the government.

1842 Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years.

1843 Poet Laureate Wordsworth is named Poet Laureate of England. Wordsworth was persuaded to become the nation's poet laureate, despite saying he wouldn't write any poetry as poet laureate. Wordsworth is the only Poet Laureate who never wrote poetry during his time as Poet Laureate.

April 23, 1850 Wordsworth Dies William Wordsworth dies of pleurisy. He is buried in St. Oswald's Church in Grasmere. Later in life, Wordsworth received several great honors which some may find quite surprising due to the fact he didn't write as much as other poets. When Wordsworth died, he was considered by many to be one of the greatest poets in the world, and some still feel this way today.

A few months after his death, Mary Wordsworth publishes The Prelude, the autobiographical poem now considered to be Wordsworth's masterpiece.

The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse. Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life without publishing it.

He never gave it a title; he called it the "Poem (title not yet fixed upon) to Coleridge" and in his letters to Dorothy Wordsworth referred to it as "the poem on the growth of my own mind." The poem was unknown to the general public until published three months after Wordsworth's death in 1850, its final name given to it by his widow Mary.

The poem was intended as the prologue to a long three-part epic and philosophical poem, The Recluse. Though Wordsworth planned this project when he was in his late 20s, he went to his grave at 80 years old having written to some completion only The Prelude and the second part (The Excursion), leaving no more than fragments of the rest.

Wordsworth planned to write this work together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, their joint intent being to surpass John Milton's Paradise Lost. Had The Recluse been completed, it would have been approximately three times longer than Paradise Lost (33,000 lines versus 10,500).

Often, in his letters, Wordsworth commented that he was plagued with agony because he failed to finish the work In the 1850 introduction, Wordsworth explains what the original idea, inspired by his "dear friend" Coleridge, was: "to compose a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society, and to be entitled the Recluse; as having for its principal subject, the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement.”

The work is a poetic reflection on Wordsworth's own sense of his poetic vocation as it developed over the course of his life. But its focus and mood present a sharp fundamental fall away from the neoclassical and into the Romantic. Whilst Milton (mentioned by name in line 181 of Book One) in Paradise Lost rewrites God's creation and The Fall of Man so as to "justify the ways of God to man," Wordsworth chooses his own mind and imagination as a subject worthy of epic.

This spiritual autobiography evolves out of Wordsworth's "persistent metaphor [that life is] a circular journey whose end is 'to arrive where we started / And know that place for the first time’. Wordsworth's Prelude opens with a literal journey [during his manhood] whose chosen goal [...] is the Vale of Grasmere.

The Prelude narrates a number of later journeys, most notably the crossing of the Alps in Book VI and, in the beginning of the final book, the climactic ascent of Snowdon. In the course of the poem, such literal journeys become the metaphorical vehicle for a spiritual journey—the quest within the poet's memory [...]".

'SPOTS OF TIME' important moments in The Prelude are for Wordsworth past experiences through which he can trace his own development, as a man and as a poet, and which continue to resonate with new meanings many years after the events.

Many of Wordsworth's 'spots of time' arise out of moments of activity, such as ice-skating, horse riding or climbing a mountain. Others come in response to a particular feeling, such as guilt after stealing a rowing boat; or a time of emotional intensity, such as the death of his father.

Stealing a boat (Book I, ls ) This spot of time is a good example of the way in which Wordsworth projects his own feelings onto a landscape. His feeling of 'troubled pleasure' on stealing the boat is given substance by the looming mountains, which eventually become 'the trouble of my dreams'. I struck, and struck again, And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff, Rose up between me and the stars, and still, With measured motion, like a living thing, Strode after me.

Ice-skating (Book I, ls ) This is a memory from Wordsworth's school days. It describes ice-skating on frozen Esthwaite Water at night. The centre of the experience is the way in which the people and the landscape are all involved: So through the darkness and the cold we flew, And not a voice was idle; with the din, Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud; The leafless trees, and every icy crag Tinkled like iron

Climbing Snowdon (Book XIII, ls 1-119) This is the imaginative vision with which the poem concludes. Here Wordsworth moves from describing the sights and sounds of the scene to imagining what might lie behind it.

... and from the shore At distance not the third part of a mile Was a blue chasm; a fracture in the vapour, A deep and gloomy breathing-place, through which Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice. The universal spectacle throughout Was shaped for admiration and delight, Grand in itself alone, but in that breach Through which the homeless voice of waters rose, That dark deep thoroughfare, had Nature lodged The Soul, the Imagination of the whole.

Wordsworth’s Achievement

NATURE: in all its forms, was important to Wordsworth, but he rarely uses simple descriptions. Instead he concentrates on the ways in which he responds and relates to the world. He uses his poetry to look at the relationship between nature and human life, and to explore the belief that nature can have an impact on our emotional and spiritual lives.

Throughout Wordsworth’s work, nature provides the ultimate good influence on the human mind. All manifestations of the natural world—from the highest mountain to the simplest flower—elicit noble, elevated thoughts and passionate emotions in the people who observe these manifestations. Wordsworth repeatedly emphasizes the importance of nature to an individual’s intellectual and spiritual development. A good relationship with nature helps individuals connect to both the spiritual and the social worlds.

As Wordsworth explains in The Prelude, a love of nature can lead to a love of humankind. In such poems as “The World Is Too Much with Us” (1807) and “London, 1802” (1807) people become selfish and immoral when they distance themselves from nature by living in cities. Humanity’s innate empathy and nobility of spirit becomes corrupted by artificial social conventions as well as by the squalor of city life. In contrast, people who spend a lot of time in nature, such as laborers and farmers, retain the purity and nobility of their souls.

THE POWER OF THE HUMAN MIND
Wordsworth praised the power of the human mind. Using memory and imagination, individuals could overcome difficulty and pain. For instance, the speaker in “Tintern Abbey” (1798) relieves his loneliness with memories of nature, while the leech gatherer in “Resolution and Independence” (1807) perseveres cheerfully in the face of poverty by the exertion of his own will. The transformative powers of the mind are available to all, regardless of an individual’s class or background. This democratic view emphasizes individuality and uniqueness.

Throughout his work, Wordsworth showed strong support for the political, religious, and artistic rights of the individual, including the power of his or her mind. In the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth explained the relationship between the mind and poetry. Poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility”—that is, the mind transforms the raw emotion of experience into poetry capable of giving pleasure. Later poems, such as “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807), imagine nature as the source of the inspiring material that nourishes the active, creative mind.

IMAGINATION Wordsworth saw imagination as a powerful, active force that works alongside our senses, interpreting the way we view the world and influencing how we react to events. He believed that a strong imaginative life is essential for our well-being. Often in Wordsworth's poetry, his intense imaginative effort translates into the great visionary moments of his work

SOCIETY Wordsworth is often considered to be an egocentric poet interested only in himself, his experiences and his development, but this is not quite a fair reflection. He supported social reform and believed in what were popularly known as The Rights of Man, the rights to individual freedoms of thought and expression, the right to justice. Society was undergoing huge changes, and the drive for economic prosperity led to an increase in both urban and rural poverty. Wordsworth explores the impact of such changes on the emotional and spiritual lives of the characters in his poems.

RELATIONSHIPS Wordsworth was not living and working in isolation; his friends and family were an important source of support and inspiration. Of his sister Dorothy, he wrote, 'She gave me eyes, she gave me ears', and, by his own admission, the best two lines in the poem I wandered lonely as a cloud were by his wife Mary.

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were among the first British poets to explore the new theories and ideas that were sweeping through Europe. Their poems display many characteristics of Romanticism:

An emphasis on the emotions (a fashionable word at the beginning of the period was ‘sensibility’. This meant having, or cultivating, a sensitive, emotional and intuitive way of understanding the world). Exploring the relationship between nature and human life.

A stress on the importance of personal experiences and a desire to understand what influences the human mind. A belief in the power of the imagination. An interest in mythological, fantastical, gothic and supernatural themes.

An emphasis on the sublime (this word was used to describe a spiritual awareness, which could be stimulated by a grand and awesome landscape). Social and political idealism.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850).

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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850).

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