wordsworth 华兹华斯

William Wordsworth
I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud & The World Is Too Much with Us
Life

William Wordsworth's long and uneventful life divides itself into four periods: 1) His childhood and youth in the Cumberland Hills from 1770 to 1787; 2 ) a period of storm and stress( a movement which happened in Germany in the 18th century, where the writers rose up against the classicists) ; this period includes his university life at Cambridge, his travels abroad, and his revolutionary experience from 1787 to 1797; 3) a short but significant period of finding himself and his works from 1797 to 1799; 4) a long period of retirement in the northern lake region, where for a full half century he lived so close to nature that her influence is reflected in all his poetry.
His Major Works

Wordsworth is a poet in memory of the past. To him, life is a cyclical journey. Its beginning finally turns out to be its end. His philosophy of life is presented in his masterpiece The Prelude. It opens with a literal journey whose goal is to return to the Vale of Grasmere. The journey goes through the poet's personal history, carrying the metaphorical meaning of his interior journey and questing for his lost early self and the proper spiritual home. The poem charts this growth from infancy to manhood. We are shown the development of human consciousness under the sway of an imagination united to the grandeur of nature. Later books of The Prelude describe Wordsworth's experiences in France: his republicanism, his affair with Annette Vallon, his “substantial dread” during the Terror and his continuing support of the ideals underlying the Revolution. The concluding description of the ascent of Snowdon becomes a symbol of the poet's climb to the height of his inspired powers and to that state of vision in which, dedicating himself to humanity, he becomes one of the “Prophets of nature”.
His Poetic Principle

Wordsworth based his own poetical principle on the premise that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”. He appealed directly to individual sensations, i.e., pleasure, excitement and enjoyment, as the foundation in the creation and appreciation of poetry. Poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”. A poet’s emotion extends from human affairs to nature, but emotion immediately expressed is as raw as wine newly bottled. Tranquil contemplation of an emotional experience matures the feeling and sensation, and makes possible the creation of good poetry like the refining of good wine. The function of poetry lies in its power to give an unexpected splendor to familiar and commonplace things, to incidents and situations from common life just as a prism can give a ray of commonplace sunlight the manifold miracle of colour. Ordinary peasants, children, even outcasts, all may be used as subjects in poetical creation. As to the language used in poetry, Wordsworth “endeavored to bring (his) language near to the real language of men”, “by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men” to a state of vivid sensation. These principles helped to crumbled the theoretical foundations of the classical school of English poetry and to spire a new generation of poets. The Preface to the “Lyrical Ballads” served as the manifesto of the English Romantic movement in poetry.
His Major Works

Wordsworth is regarded as a "worshipper of nature". Poems like "The Sparrow's Nest", "To a Skylark", "To the Cuckoo" and "To a Butterfly" are just a few examples to show his genuine love for the natural beauty. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature, and one that takes us to the core of Wordsworth's poetic beliefs. To Wordsworth, nature acts as a substitute for imaginative and intellectual engagement with the development of embodied human beings in their diverse circumstances. It's nature that gives him strength and knowledge full nely as a Cloud”
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud "
His Major Works

Wordsworth thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest. The joys and sorrows of the common people are his themes. His sympathy always goes to the suffering poor. When we read poems like: " The Thorn ", " The Sailor's Mother", "Michael", "The Affliction of Margaret", and "The Old Cumberland Beggar", we find ourselves in the presence of poverty, crime, insanity, ruined innocence, solitary anguish, and even despair. The "Lucy poems" describe with rare elusive beauty of simple lyricism and haunting rhythm a young country girl living a simple life in a remote village far from the civilized world. They are verses of love and loss which hold within their delicate simplicity a meditation on time and death which rises to universal stat re. In its daring use of subject matter and sense of the authenticity of the experience of the poorest, "Resolution and Independence" is the triumphant conclusion of ideas first developed in the Lyrical Ballads.