William Wordsworth is the Romantic poet most often described as a "nature" writer; what the word "nature" meant

to Wordsworth is, however, a complex issue. On the one hand, Wordsworth was the quintessential poet as naturalist, always paying close attention to details of the physical environment around him (plants, animals, geography, weather). At the same time, Wordsworth was a self-consciously literary artist who described "the mind of man" as the "main haunt and region of [his] song." This tension between objective describer of the natural scene and subjective shaper of sensory experience is partly the result of Wordsworth's view of the mind as "creator and receiver both." Wordsworth consistently describes his own mind as the recipient of external sensations which are then rendered into its own mental creations. (Shelleymade a related claim in "Mont Blanc" when he said that his mind "passively / Now renders and receives, fast influencings, / Holding an unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of things around".) Such an alliance of the inner life with the outer world is at the heart of Wordsworth's descriptions of nature. Wordsworth's ideas about memory, the importance of childhood experiences, and the power of the mind to bestow an "auxiliar" light on the objects it beholds all depend on this ability to record experiences carefully at the moment of observation but then to shape those same experiences in the mind over time. We should also recall, however, that he made widespread use of other texts in the production of his Wordsworthian (Keats said "egotistical") sublime: drafts of poems by Coleridge, his sister Dorothy's Journals, the works of Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, and countless others. Wordsworthian "nature" emerges as much a product of his widespead reading as of his wanderings amid the affecting landscapes of the Lake District. His poems often present an instant when nature speaks to him and he responds by speaking for nature. The language of nature in such instances is, like the language Wordsworth uses to record such events, often cryptic and enigmatic. The owls in the often-quoted "Boy of Winander" passage of The Prelude hoot to a Wordsworthian child who answers first in their owllanguage and then with a poem that records only the mirroring image of an "uncertain heaven," the dark sky reflected in a still silent lake. Wordsworth longs for a version of nature that will redeem him from the vagaries of passing moments, but he usually records those natural phenomena that promise only the passing of time and the cyclical transience of natural process. "Nutting" holds us up painfully against the ravaging of a pristine and naturally spiritualized bower. The Lucy poems tells us that Lucy is back into nature at her death, but that consolation seems small recompense for the humanized "nature" of the loss. The Prelude wants to keep us in touch with a childhood and subsequent adult identity realized within the natural world; at the same time, however, this autobiographical epic leaves adult readers feeling a long way from the "spots of time" of childhood. Nothing in Wordsworth is simple or singular; like Milton, he is a poet who almost resists the possibility of final or definitive interpretation. His view of nonhuman nature is likewise openended. Wordsworth's "nature" points us away from the closed world of theocentric symbol-making toward the unstable world of postmodern meaning.
William Wordsworth: Revolution & Romanticism
In 1791, William Wordsworth graduated from Cambridge and traveled to France, which was then in the throes of the French Revolution. When we think of the French Revolution today, we picture guillotine blades, beheadings, and the Reign of Terror. All those things were years away when William Wordsworth arrived in Paris. At the time, the revolution was a truly Romantic political act. No one anticipated how it would later go awry. Until the Revolution, France had been ruled by a monarchy with absolute power, whose policies wrecked the economy. A frustrated population guided by the values of the Enlightenment sought change. Wordsworth was fascinated by the Republicans, the faction that sought to establish a government headed by a leader of the people's choosing. For an idealistic young European, France was THE place to be. In his long autobiographical poem The Prelude, Wordsworth wrote about that time: "For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, us who were strong in love! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven! O times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute, took at once 6 The attraction of a country in romance!" Wordsworth fell in love with a Frenchwoman named Annette Vallon. The two were serious about each other, but by 1792 Wordsworth ran out of money and returned to England, leaving behind a pregnant Vallon and their unborn baby. When war broke out in France, he was unable to go back to his family. It would be a decade before Wordsworth met his daughter Caroline, though he eventually arranged for her financial support. Inspired by his experience in France, Wordsworth began to work on a series of poems. The results, two collections of poetry entitled Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk, were published in 1793. Back in Cambridge, England, a senior named Samuel Taylor Coleridge finished reading Descriptive Sketches and decreed that "seldom, if ever, was the emergence of an original poetic genius above the literary horizon more evidently 7 announced." Coleridge, a vicar's son from Devon, was a brilliant student and poet whose academic career was marred only by his difficulties in making deadlines and waking up on time. In Wordsworth, he recognized the beginnings of a new type of poetry, one that struck him as genius. "It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought," Coleridge wrote, 8 "the fine balance of truth in observing, with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed." He finally met Wordsworth in 1795, when the poet and his sister Dorothy were living in a house together in Dorset, England. He walked an incredible 50 (!) miles to get there, and as he approached Wordsworth noticed that their visitor "did not keep to the 9 high road, but leaped over a gate and bounded down a pathless field by which he cut off an angle." Such was Coleridge's enthusiasm to reach his new friend. The two poets took to one another instantly, and in 1797 Dorothy and William moved to a house in Nether Stowey in order to be closer to Coleridge. Thus began one of the most productive, intense, and unusual three-way friendships in literary history.

William Wordsworth is regarded one of the finest English poets in the Romantic period, i.e. the first half of the 19th. century. He was born in 1770 in Northern England, in an area called the Lake District. The Lake District has a most beautiful scenery which came to inspire Wordsworth much in his writings. Today the Lake District is a National Park. Isolation in Germany 1770 was by the way the same year as the composer Beethoven was born in Bonn in Germany. Wordsworth actually stayed in Germany for the winter of 1798-1799, though he never met the famous composer. Instead, living in the remote town of Goslar, he felt just like Beethoven felt through most of his life: frightfully lonely and isolated. And yet he produced some of his greatest poems during this winter (incidentally he wrote this poem in 1798). Some people say that there is no creation without suffering. Here we have an example of that perhaps. Poetry is love! Wordsworth became friend with another famous English poet, Samuel Coleridge, and

inspired by their friendship Wordsworth began composing his short lyrical and dramatic poems for which he is perhaps best remembered by most people today. Some of these poems were loving tributes to Dorothy, his beloved sister, some were tributes to plants, 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. The country girl in the poem "We are seven" is a perfect illustration of this last type of poems. A new view on nature When Wordsworth died in 1850 he knew that he had renewed the style of English poetry and that he had brought the Romantic revolution to England. Through his poems he had also generated a new attitude towards nature. Nature was no longer something "out there" that had to be mastered and conquered, rather nature was a part of ourselves, there was no difference between human nature and physical nature. He talks about a wedding between the two. This view is typically Romantic and also we should not forget that Wordsworth was brought up in the Lake Districtone of Britains most beautiful areas.