William Wordsworth: A Literary Life

217 Pages·1996·12.26 MB·English

by  John Williams (auth.)

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Literary Lives
General Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English
Lancaster University
This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of
the most admired and influential English-language authors.
Volumes follow the outline of writers' working lives, not in
the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace
the professional, publishing and social contexts which
shaped their writing.
A list of the published titles in this series follows overleaf.
Published titles
Morris Beja John Mepham
JAMES JOYCE VIRGINIA WOOLF
Cedric C. Brown Michael O'Neill
JOHN MILTON PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Peter Davison Leonie Ormond
GEORGE ORWELL ALFRED TENNYSON
Richard Dutton George Parfitt
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE JOHNOONNE
Jan Fergus Gerald Roberts
JANE AUSTEN GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
James Gibson Felicity Rosslyn
THOMAS HARDY ALEXANDER POPE
Kenneth Graham Tony Sharpe
HENRY JAMES T. S. ELIOT
Paul Hammond Grahame Smith
JOHN DRYDEN CHARLES DICKENS
W. David Kay Gary Waller
BEN JONSON EDMUND SPENSER
Mary Lago Cedric Watts
E. M. FORSTER JOSEPH CONRAD
Alasdair D. F. Macrae John Williams
W. B. YEATS WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
Joseph McMinn Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham
JONATHAN SWIFf CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE
Kerry McSweeney John Worthen
GEORGE ELIOT D. H. LAWRENCE
(MARIAN EVANS)
Willialll WordsW"orth
A Literary Life
John Williams
Reader in Literary Studies
University of Greenwich
© John Williams 1996
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First published 1996 by
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from the British Library.
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Published in the United States of America 1996 by
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ISBN 978-0-312-15864-4
For
Anne, Mark and Rebecca
Contents
Note on Texts and Abbreviations viii
1 Writing the Literary Life 1
2 Early Years 20
3 From France to Racedown: 1792-97 38
4 Alfoxden 69
5 The Making of a Modem Poet: 1798-1805 98
6 Grasmere Poetry: Dove Cottage Life 123
7 1807-15: The Mflictions of Life 151
8 1814-20: Few and Scattered Hearers 172
9 As Much Peter Bell As Ever 182
Notes 194
Further Reading 200
Index 203
vii
Note on Texts and
Abbreviations
References contained in the text use the following format: abbrevi
ated form; volume number where appropriate; sonnet number where
appropriate; for The Prelude and The Excursion Book number where
appropriate; page number; line number(s) where appropriate. Where
the text already supplies information it will not normally be duplic
ated in the reference. Unless otherwise stated in the text or the refer
ence given, the 1805 text of The Prelude is used.
ABBREVIATED FORMS
Borderers: The Borderers, William Wordsworth, ed. Robert Osborn
(Ithaca and London, 1982).
DS: Descriptive Sketches, William Wordsworth, ed. Eric Birdsall (Ithaca
and London, 1984).
EW: An Evening Walk, William Wordsworth, ed. James Averill (Ithaca
and London, 1984).
EY: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Early Years
1787-1805, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, second edition rev. Chester
L. Shaver (Oxford, 1967).
HG: Home at Grasmere, William Wordsworth, ed. Beth Darlington
(Ithaca and Hassocks, 1977).
LB: Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems 1797-1800, William Wordsworth,
ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca and London, 1992).
LY II: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Later Years,
Part II, 1829-1834, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1979).
MY I: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Middle Years,
Part I, 1806-1811, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman
(Oxford, 1969).
MY II: The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, The Later Years,
Part II, 1812-1820, ed. Ernest De Selincourt, rev. Mary Moorman
and Alan G. Hill (Oxford, 1970).
PB: Peter Bell, William Wordsworth, ed. John E. Jordan (Ithaca and
London, 1985).
viii
Note on Texts and Abbreviations ix
Prelude: The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth,
M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York and London, 1979).
Prose: The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols, ed. W. J. B. Owen
and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford, 1974).
PW: The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 5 vols, ed. Ernest De
Selincourt (Oxford, 1952).
RC: The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, William Wordsworth, ed.
James Butler (Ithaca and Hassocks, 1979).
SP: The Salisbury Plain Poems, William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill
(Ithaca and Hassocks, 1975).
TP: The Tuft of Primroses with Other Late Poems for The Recluse, William
Wordsworth, ed. Joseph H. Kishel (Ithaca and London, 1986).
W: Benjamin the Waggoner, William Wordsworth, ed. Paul F. Betz
(Ithaca and Brighton, 1981).
WD: The White Doe of Rylstone, William Wordsworth, ed. Kristine
Dugas (Ithaca and London, 1988).
1807: Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems 1800-1807, William
Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, 1992).
1
Writing the Literary Life
INTRODUCTION
Since his death in 1850, Wordsworth's life has been written many
times. Modem scholarship has revealed the considerable extent to
which Wordsworth rewrote and edited his own autobiography in The
Prelude between 1799 and 1850, and what biographers have made of
the raw material since has varied a good deal. The account this book
offers portrays a man who seems to have spent at least the first forty
or so years of his life working against the grain. He worked against
the wishes and aspirations of those who, with both his parents dead,
took on the task of supporting him through school and university.
As a young man he identified with the political beliefs of those who
were prepared to challenge and work against the political establish
ment of the day. As a poet he identified early on with contemporary
trends, and began to write in ways specifically designed to challenge
orthodox literary conventions, producing in consequence poetry guar
anteed to make a reading public for his work hard to establish and
retain.
A life of this kind set him under a constant obligation to justify
- to himself as well as to others - why he was refusing to conform.
Why should he alone persist in being awkward (in wishing to
become a modem poet) when his brothers were doing their best to
achieve what was expected of them? The result of this situation
was to ensure that all Wordsworth's poetry - whatever else it was
intended for - was caught up with a process of inscribing and reaf
firming the course of the life he intended to lead. This is why time
and again those who met him and those who read him were struck
by the degree of self-absorption they encountered. Shelley was right:
He had a mind which was somehow
At once circumference and centre
Of all he might or feel or know;
Nothing went ever out, although
Something did ever enter.l
1