Introducing William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth
1770-1850

William Wordsworth's name always makes me chuckle because he's a writer, so he knows what words are worth.  He was born in northern England, in the Lake District, which is where Elizabeth Bennet goes on vacation in Pride and Prejudice.  Check out this amazing view -- you can see why people went there on vacations!  Here's another.  No wonder Wordsworth wrote so much about the natural world's beauty!  I mean, honestly, no wonder Elizabeth Bennet rhapsodized about the rocks and mountains.

Okay, so, Wordsworth is one of the two English poets who started the Romantic Movement -- the other is Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  (I like Wordsworth's poetry a bit better than Coleridge's, so I picked him for you to study, and you're stuck with him.)  Wordsworth and Coleridge published a poetry book together in 1798, Lyrical Ballads, and it kind of kicked off the Romantic Movement (also called Romanticism and the Romantic Era).  This is big-R Romantic, which is all about reveling in and appreciation the beauty of nature, idealizing heroism, and being fascinated by anything exotic or mysterious, even supernatural.  It really doesn't have anything to do with romantic love, but instead is a sort of reaction against the Industrial Revolution -- it prefers natural landscapes and rustic beauty to cities, factories, anything involving gears and machinery.  You can learn more about it here on Wikipedia if you wish.

You're going to notice a lot of that in Wordsworth's poetry -- lots of loving nature, valuing simplicity, and celebrating imagination.  Think of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility -- she is like a personification of the big-R Romantic Movement.  Wordsworth doesn't get mentioned in that book, but I'm sure Marianne was a fan of his too, since S&S was published in 1811, when the Romantic Movement was really getting rolling.

Part of the Romantic ideal for writing is to focus on everyday life, and the common people.  Instead of using flowery or high-toned language, they use ordinary words and try to make their poetry sound as natural as possible.  There's still a lot of rhyming going on in that era, but you won't find loads of fancy words.

Discussion Questions:

1.  Have you read anything of Wordsworth's before, that you're aware of?

2.  Have you learned about the Romantic Movement before?  Do you know anything more about it that you'd like to share here?