Religion had relied on supposed fact the science of Lyell, Darwin and others had disproved those facts. Introducing an anthology of The English Poets, he argued, under the deep influence of Wordsworth, that the future spirit of humankind would depend on poetry. Thirty years after Wordsworth’s death, and twenty after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Matthew Arnold recognized which way the wind had blown. Radical Wordsworth survives today whenever a person walks for pleasure and takes spiritual refreshment in the mountains or when a heart leaps up at the sight of a rainbow in the sky or a tuft of primroses in flower. Radical Wordsworth endured through the 19th century in the poetry of Keats and Shelley, John Clare and Felicia Hemans (and, by negative influence, Byron) in the art of Benjamin Robert Haydon and the prose of Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb in the ideas of John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and George Eliot in the deeds of Canon Rawnsley, Stopford Brooke and Beatrix Potter and, across the Atlantic, in the visions of Emerson, Thoreau and John Muir. Yet as his mortal powers waned, he began to achieve immortality: his spirit lived on by means of his inspiration upon the next generation of readers and writers, then far beyond. Though Coleridge would be generous in writing of Wordsworth’s gifts in Biographia Literaria, and Wordsworth would mourn Coleridge’s passing in the “Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg,” it would never be glad confident morning again.Īs he settled into fame and a gentleman’s life at Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s genius deserted him. It broke down almost irretrievably after Basil Montagu passed on the gossip about Wordsworth finding Coleridge impossible to live with because of the alcohol and the opium. The composite Wordsworthian–Coleridgean identity began to fracture on that morning of Saturday, December 27th, 1806 when Coleridge saw, or thought he saw, Wordsworth in bed with Sara Hutchinson. Yet Emerson’s own capacious mind and his vision for American literature were shaped less by Goethe than by the poetry of Wordsworth and the ideas of Coleridge. Out of Wordsworth comes a manifesto for the enduring value of poetry beyond even that of religion, philosophy and science. Their imaginative cross-fertilization made them into, to adapt a phrase of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, a composite “representative man.” Among the “great men” of his own time, Emerson regarded Napoleon as the archetypal “man of the world,” the “representative of the popular external life and aims of the 19th century,” and Goethe as the philosopher of the “multiplicity” of its inner life. Hazlitt believed that Wordsworth and Coleridge embodied the spirit of the age. He and his fellow poets and philosophers changed forever the way we think about childhood, about the sense of the self, about the purpose of poetry, and especially about our connection to our surroundings. In Victorian England, and simultaneously in the young United States of America, Wordsworth came to be regarded as a central figure in the revolutionary shift in cultural attitudes that would eventually be called the Romantic movement. He became the mouth of his generation for what Keats called “the true voice of feeling.” Wordsworth’s poetry was a way of happening because of the new way in which he sought, as Keats put it, to “think into the human heart” by means of an unprecedented examination of the development of his own mind and his sense of belonging in the world. Having said that poetry makes nothing happen, he went on, later in the same poem, to describe poetry as “A way of happening, a mouth.” Poets often disagree with themselves, which is one of the things that makes them poets. Globally, his influence extended to John Muir’s passion for the preservation of Yosemite.Īuden did not in fact believe that poetry makes nothing happen. Nationally, he made new claims for the power of poetry that shaped the minds of the most influential thinkers in Victorian Britain. Locally, the ecology and economy of the vale of Grasmere, and the wider Lake District, were changed as a result of his canonization. William Wordsworth was not merely the most admired English poet of the 19th century: his poetry made many things happen. Auden in his poem on the death of fellow poet W.
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