William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth, (born April 7, 1770, Cockermouth, Cumberland, England—died April 23, 1850, Rydal Mount, Westmorland), English poet whose Lyrical Ballads (1798), written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement.
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) produced some of the greatest English poems of the late 1700s and early 1800s. In contrast to the decorum of much 18th-century verse, he wanted to relate “situations from common life” in “language really used by men,” embodying “the spontaneous overflow of feelings…recollected in tranquility” (preface to Lyrical Ballads [1802]).
Wordsworth’s Imagination
Wordsworth is one of the most influential Romantic poets who created a unique style of writing based on ideals of nature and imagination. His poetry was based on Romantic ideas opposed to Realism. Snatches of realism remain very welcome to Romantic sensationalists, especially as an escape from the starched dignities of Classicism. The Romantic reaction was healthy; but, like most reactions, it became extravagant and so unhealthy in its turn. As a Romantic writer, Wordsworth’s style grows more eloquent, more magical in the music of phrase and imagery, more impressive in the frank intensity of his feeling of imagination, in the atmosphere that passion can create.
Wordsworth made many attempts to define and il- lustrate the faculty which he and Coleridge and others of the Romantic generation called Imagination, but with the exception of the Preface of 1815 he made no effort to pro- duce a sustained, formal theory of its nature and operations.
Begin with some manuscript fragments of verse
which the learned attribute to the late 1790s. In a frag-
ment dated 1796 or 1797, Wordsworth addresses the river
Derwent:
I hear thy voice,
that peculiar voice
Heard in the stillness of the evening air,
Half-heard and half-created. (PW, V.340)
This passage anticipates better known lines in "Tintern
Abbey":
all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,
both what they half create, And what perceive; (105-7)
a passage for which Wordsworth acknowledges his debt
to a line from Edward Young's Night Thoughts (VI. 424):
"And half-create the wondrous world they [the senses] see."
The fullest statement of these notions at this period occurs
in another fragment, probably of 1798 or 1799:
There is creation in the eye,
Nor less in all the other senses; powers
They are that colour, model, and combine
It is impossible to move very far in either the poetry or the prose of Wordsworth without meeting an explicit reference to what is at once the most ubiquitous and most nebulous term in his vocabulary the imagination. All too often, his references to this important faculty, which holds the key to his theory of poetry, are frag- mentary and confused. Nevertheless, his statements on the imagination and particularly those of his later years seem to point substantially in one direction: that the primary effect of imaginative power is the evocation of meaning from the material world, the manifestation of a visible object as the emblem of invisible truth. As a practicing poet, Wordsworth best embodies this effect in the most consciously and deliberately "imaginative" of all his poems.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (born October 21, 1772, Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, England—died July 25, 1834, Highgate, near London), English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His Lyrical Ballads, written with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his Biographia Literaria (1817) is the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period.
Coleridge's poetry, such as "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan," is rich in symbolism and vivid imagery. He skillfully employed these elements to create dreamlike, otherworldly landscapes and narratives. For instance, in "Kubla Khan," he painted a fantastical and surreal picture of a mystical land, drawing from his imaginative faculties.Coleridge was fascinated by dreams and the unconscious mind.
Coleridge's creative writing was characterized by his vivid imagination, philosophical depth, and innovative use of language. His contributions to poetry, literary criticism, and philosophy continue to be celebrated for their lasting impact on literature and thought.
Coleridge’s achievement has been given more widely varying assessments than that of any other English literary artist, though there is broad agreement that his enormous potential was never fully realized in his works. His stature as a poet has never been in doubt; in “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” he wrote two of the greatest poems in English literature and perfected a mode of sensuous lyricism that is often echoed by later poets. But he also has a reputation as one of the most important of all English literary critics, largely on the basis of his Biographia Literaria. In Coleridge’s view, the essential element of literature was a union of emotion and thought that he described as imagination. He especially stressed poetry’s capacity for integrating the universal and the particular, the objective and the subjective, the generic and the individual. The function of criticism for Coleridge was to discern these elements and to lift them into conscious awareness, rather than merely to prescribe or to describe rules or forms.significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period.
In all his roles, as poet, social critic, literary critic, theologian, and psychologist, Coleridge expressed a profound concern with elucidating an underlying creative principle that is fundamental to both human beings and the universe as a whole. To Coleridge, imagination is the archetype of this unifying force because it represents the means by which the twin human capacities for intuitive, non-rational understanding and for organizing and discriminating thought concerning the material world are reconciled. It was by means of this sort of reconciliation of opposites that Coleridge attempted, with considerable success, to combine a sense of the universal and ideal with an acute observation of the particular and sensory in his own poetry and in his criticism.
Serenity Through Imagination
Imagination proves to be Coleridge’s only comfort when he is unable to join his friends for a walk. “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” focuses on his imagining what his friends see and feel on their trek. Coleridge begins by describing in specific detail the places with which he is familiar and then moves to speculation about what his friends will see. They view “the sea, / With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up / The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles / Of purple shadow!” (23-26).
William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” are similar in many ways, in part because they are the poets’ personal reflections on the beauty of nature and the power of memory. Indeed, both poets believe that memory and imagination are vital in the creation of poetry. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, imagination can bring joy into people’s hearts, and the memories of special places can fortify the spirit.
The great decade: 1797–1808
While living with Dorothy at Alfoxden House, Wordsworth became friends with a fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They formed a partnership that would change both poets’ lives and alter the course of English poetry.
Coleridge and Lyrical Ballads
The partnership between Wordsworth and Coleridge, rooted in one marvelous year (1797–98) in which they “together wantoned in wild Poesy,” had two consequences for Wordsworth. First it turned him away from the long poems on which he had labored since his Cambridge days. These included poems of social protest like Salisbury Plain, loco-descriptive poems such as An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches (published in 1793), and The Borderers, a blank-verse tragedy exploring the psychology of guilt (and not published until 1842). Stimulated by Coleridge and under the healing influences of nature and his sister, Wordsworth began in 1797–98 to compose the short lyrical and dramatic poems for which he is best remembered by many readers. Some of these were affectionate tributes to Dorothy, some were tributes to daffodils, birds, and other elements of “Nature’s holy plan,” and some were portraits of simple rural people intended to illustrate basic truths of human nature.
Many of these short poems were written to a daringly original program formulated jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and aimed at breaking the decorum of Neoclassical verse. These poems appeared in 1798 in a slim, anonymously authored volume entitled Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge’s long poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and closed with Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” All but three of the intervening poems were Wordsworth’s, and, as he declared in a preface to a second edition two years later, their object was “to choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them…in a selection of language really used by men,…tracing in them…the primary laws of our nature.” Most of the poems were dramatic in form, designed to reveal the character of the speaker. The manifesto and the accompanying poems thus set forth a new style, a new vocabulary, and new subjects for poetry, all of them foreshadowing 20th-century developments.
Conclusion
In essence, while Wordsworth celebrated the imaginative connection between humanity and nature, Coleridge ventured into the deeper recesses of the subconscious, exploring the fantastical and philosophical aspects of the imaginative realm. Both poets, however, recognized the immense power of imagination in shaping perception, emotions, and creative expression, leaving an indelible mark on literature with their distinct yet complementary approaches to the role of imagination in their creative writing.
References
Beer, John Bernard. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge". Encyclopedia Britannica, 17 Oct. 2023, https: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Taylor-Coleridge Accessed 26 November 2023.
James A. W. Heffernan. “Wordsworth on Imagination: The Emblemizing Power.” PMLA, vol. 81, no. 5, 1966, pp. 389–99. JSTOR,https://www.jstor.org/stable/460829. Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.
Owen, W. J. B. “Wordsworth’s Imaginations.” The Wordsworth Circle, vol. 14, no. 4, 1983, pp. 213–24. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24040640 Accessed 26 Nov. 2023.
Parrish, Stephen Maxfield. "William Wordsworth". Encyclopedia Britannica, 7 Nov. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Wordsworth Accessed 26 November 202.
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