Yet some masterpieces are so great that they will bear endless repetition without losing their effect, and I suspect that the spiritual balm of this poem’s opening lines (particularly the first) will soothe souls for as long as English is understood: This poem is by now a bit too famous for its own good. That floats on high o’er vales and hills, Daffodils, or ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ So, on to the rundown of his eight greatest poems, eight being the least great, one being the finest:Ĩ. Although practicality kept him from this early lover and daughter, he helped to support them financially for the rest of their lives. Paul, ‘I am the chief of sinners!’ But this story gives a little bit more flesh and blood to the man. As well as the intellectual foolery of his early revolutionary years, he also fathered an illegitimate child whilst living in France. Wordsworth is the best kind of moralist: although obsessed with goodness, and though striving to be good, he had his faults. And he is not so much a distant, admired figure as he is a dear friend to those who love to read him and hear the music of his lines. So great and impressive is his soul, one almost feels he lives today with us he is imprinted upon his surroundings in recording them, he (in a sense) makes them for us. Those of us who love Wordsworth’s poetry, then (and he does have his detractors, though these people I do not understand), love the man himself. In this he is virtually the opposite of (say) Shakespeare, who banishes his own personal voice about as much as is possible in the hugely personal practice of literary creation. In Wordsworth’s poetry, a personal voice-indeed a whole personality-comes out with incredible vividness and force. Indeed, for these poets, the distinction between world and self is hardly relevant, since the former is to be experienced only by way of the latter, and the latter experiences nothing other than the former. His chief works are-like Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, or even Dante’s Commedia-explorations of the entire world by way of the self. Wordsworth sings of walks and of the man-and the man is himself. The results often move his readers to tears.
One begins to get a sense, just from the music and the longing of this single line of iambic pentameter, of how sorrow and joy beautifully intermingle in Wordsworth they do so in a truly personal voice which ought to be the sincere envy of all us poets who cannot match that sincerity. Thus, in what is perhaps his most ambitious work, The Prelude, his poetic autobiography, he could say of the Revolutionary era, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ and also could denounce the violence and ‘atheism’ of Robespierre and the other architects of the terror. Yet, like many, he remained a lover of the Rousseauan ideals which animated the early revolution. The Revolution’s bloody turn, which appalled Wordsworth, affected him for the rest of his life. In his youth, for example, he was fired with the revolutionary zeal which in the 1790s-while he was in his twenties-infected so many Europeans whilst the ideals and the resentments of The French Revolution matured and, ultimately, plummeted into La Terreur. Wordsworth possesses one of the most intriguing biographies of all the poets, which is itself indispensable for understanding his poetry. Therefore, you will not scruple when a difficult point of Law occurs, to consult me.’ He had many friends in high places, including Queen Victoria herself, and he was awarded honorary degrees by both Durham and Oxford-honours which Wordsworth responded to with dry wit in a letter to Henry Crabb Robinson (28 July 1838): ‘I forgot to mention that the University of Durham the other day by especial convocation conferred upon me the honorary degree of L.L.D. He spent his last couple of decades, after many years of less genial reception (see, for example, Byron’s, Shelley’s, and Keats’ responses to Wordsworth), enjoying his well-earned popularity amongst the early Victorians. In those eighty years, Wordsworth brought a unique poetry to English letters and to the world it had never before been seen, nor has it since. William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in 1770-the same year as gave us Beethoven, Hegel, and Hölderlin-and died at the age of eighty, rich in the knowledge of his huge accomplishments, in Rydal Mount, Westmorland, in 1850.
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