William Wordsworth (redirected from Annette Vallon)

Wordsworth, William 

Born Apr. 7, 1770, at Cock-ermouth; died Apr. 23, 1850, at Rydal Mount, near Gras-mere, Westmorland. English poet.

Wordsworth graduated from Cambridge University. He experienced the influence of the Great French Revolution and sympathized with the victims of the agrarian-industrial revolution in Britain (the narrative poem Guilt and Sorrow, 1793-94). At the end of the 1790’s Wordsworth established close relations with S. Coleridge and R. Southey, and they formed an association based on mutually shared ideas, known as the Lake School. In 1798, Wordsworth and Cole-ridge jointly published the collection Lyrical Ballads; the foreword to the second edition of this collection (1800) became the aesthetic manifesto of conservative romanticism. Having broken away from the classicist standards of the 18th century, Wordsworth wrote about the ruination of the centuries-old bases of peasant life in his ballads, which are permeated with sincere feeling (We Are Seven, The Brothers)’, he conveyed the thoughts of simple laborers, the natural beauty of his country (“Lines Written in Early Spring”) and the strength of love (Lucy). Wordsworth wrote poems about the Negroes who had revolted in Haiti and about the Tirolean peasants who were struggling against Napoleon (the cycle Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty, 1802-16); this same cycle also included officially patriotic poems. With the passing years Wordsworth became more and more inclined to take conservative positions: for example, in his Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822) he represented the history of Europe as a change in religious doctrines. In his autobio-graphical narrative poem The Prelude (1850), Wordsworth rejected the radicalism of his youth. In 1843 he received the title of poet laureate.

WORKS

Poetical Works. London, 1956.
Literary Criticism. London, 1966.
In Russian translation:
In S. Ia. Marshak. Sobr. soch., vol. 3. Moscow, 1959.

REFERENCES

Elistratova, A. A. Nasledie angliiskogo romantizma i sovremennost’. Moscow, 1960.
Rader, M. Wordsworth: A Philosophical Approach. [Oxford] 1967.
Sneath, E. H. Wordsworth: Poet of Nature and Poet of Man. Port Washington, N. Y., 1967.
Moorman, M. W. Wordsworth: A Biography, vols. 1-2. Oxford, 1957-65.
Peek, K. M. Wordsworth in England. New York, 1969.

B. A. GILENSON