William Wordsworth: The Major Works

"Yes, my first pick is Wordsworth’s 1802 poem ‘Resolution and Independence’. I’ve taught Romantic poetry to American undergraduates for more than twenty years and this fascinates my students because the action is all in the young Wordsworth’s mind and emotions. At this time in his life, Wordsworth didn’t have a job or much purpose, and most of his poems are about roaming the countryside and meeting odd people. The poem begins with Wordsworth in an exultant mood on a beautiful spring day on the moor. Then, as if he’s committed the sin of being too happy, he experiences a kind of panic attack: “fears and fancies thick upon me came.” How can a person be happy one moment then depressed the next, for no apparent reason? That’s exactly the kind of emotional question that fascinated the Romantics. “How can a person be happy one moment then depressed the next, for no apparent reason?” Wordsworth then runs into a lonely figure on the moor. He is an old, very poor man, who ekes out a living gathering leeches to sell to medical men. Not a great profession and, what’s worse, there are fewer leeches on the moor than before. But despite all this, the leech-gatherer is undaunted, even serene. Weirdly, Wordsworth has what we might call an out-of-body experience while conversing with this old man. He receives a ‘strong admonishment’ from the Universe, to find strength in adversity as the leech-gatherer has. A strange, amazing, and utterly Wordsworthian poem. Famous lines to quote at your next dinner party: We poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness. This is from the early, anxious part of the story, where Wordsworth is dwelling on the unhappy fates of his poetic predecessors Burns and Chatterton, who both died young and miserable. He’s wondering if the happiness he’s feeling will inevitably give way to doom. It’s the kind of irrational fear you or I could have: he just expresses it better."

"Stephen Gill’s edition gives us William Wordsworth’s career from the beginning right the way through, and it’s a long career – he started writing very young. Gill gives it to us collection by collection, so we see Wordsworth emerging at publication moments. The poems are selected with considerable care, and the book gives a very even account of Wordsworth’s whole life as a writer – prose as well as poetry – both in his publications and his unpublished, more private moments. This edition highlights the sense in which William Wordsworth attempted to tilt poetic tastes in a new direction. He famously talked about having to ‘create the taste by which he was to be enjoyed’. Each publication moment shows him engaged with current tastes and trying to reform them. In the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 and 1800, he tried to get rid of artifical poetic diction by using plain language. And in his Poems in Two Volumes (1807) he brought poetry into the household, using a domestic register to explore intimate moments, family relationships, and the wonder of everyday sights and sounds in a cottage garden. Some reviewers hated this book. They regarded it as ‘namby pamby’ and feminine – the domestication of great poetic themes was condemned as infra dig. That’s right. The reviewers of 1807 were repulsed by the idea that poetry written by a man could be this domestic. Wordsworth succeeded in straddling both public and private worlds; and in his poetry – particularly his long autobiographical poem The Prelude — he succeeded in bringing grand epic themes down to earth. His reclusive life in the Lake District was not by any means an abnegation of his public responsibilities, but it does show that he put his family life first. He was never happier that when he was at home in Cumberland. In his late years, when he was Poet Laureate, he hated the world of London literati, and being lionised. He wanted to go back to his family."