WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770 1850)

William Wordsworth was born in an English beautiful region, near the Scottish border
where he lived for many years and which became his first source of inspiration
because of his contact with nature when he was young.
An important aspect of his life was the friendship with Coleridge, which signed the
development of the English romantic poetry. The two poets wrote together a
collection of poems called LYRICAL BALLADS, which also contains Wordsworths
famous preface that became the Manifesto of English Romanticism.
His masterpiece is THE PRELUDE, a long autobiographical poem.
Wordsworth is one of the English nature-poet; but he isnt interested in natural
world and in the observation of his phenomena, but in the relationship between
natural world and human consciousness, with the sensations and the emotions
which arise from this interaction. One of the most important concepts in Wordsworth
is the idea that man and nature are inseparable, that man doesnt exist outside the
natural world, he is part of it.
Men learn love, happiness and beauty when they look at natural elements. He
thinks that in nature there are a lot of values which are the guide to the spiritual and
moral life of men. Nature is seen not as beautiful scenery, but as a spiritual
influence on life. He identifies the natural universe with God.
Nature means also the world of sense perceptions. Wordsworth believed that
sensations lead to simple thoughts and then to complex and organised ideas. These
3 stages of the minds development correspond to the 3 ages of a man: childhood,
youth and adulthood. In fact Wordsworth was interested in the changes of
relationship with nature in the different moments of life. For Wordsworth childhood
is the most important age in mans life (in a poem he says "the Child is father to the
Man") because of imagination and memory that are more vivid than in the adults. In
particular, memory is important because it gives life and power to the poetry.
The Poet is a teacher who shows to other men how to explain their feelings and
improve their moral being. In his poems Wordsworth describes ordinary things and
real emotions. He doesn't want to speak only to a little elite of people, but to a
much more numerous audience, using an ordinary language that all people can
speak and understand; he very often used blank verse and different kinds of
poems, as sonnets, odes, ballads and simple lyrics.
In the Preface of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth expresses a new concept of poetry,
which emphasises the authenticity of rustic life and the use of a simple language.
Wordsworth describes stories from common life, using a spoken and easy language.
In fact, his language is not sophisticated, because he believes that simple feelings
have to be expressed with simple expressions. In this way everybody can
understand what the poet says .
Education and the civilised world are seen in a negative way by Wordsworth. On the
contrary, in the country life man can better express his feelings.

Poetry becomes a vocation, and the poet is a prophet: a poet has got much more
sensibility, enthusiasm and tenderness than ordinary men, a greater knowledge of
human nature, a more comprehensive soul and imagination that makes him look at
the nature with different eyes.