Remembering Wordsworth - Essays and Extracts on the Life and Work of the Great Poet

Various

• Publisher: Ragged Hand - Read & Co.
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781528789363
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

"Remembering Wordsworth" is a fantastic collection of essays and other assorted writings by various authors discussing the life and work of this seminal poet, not to be missed by lovers of poetry and those with an interest Wordsworth's life both public and private. Contents include: "William Wordsworth, by Hattie Tyng Griswold", "WM. Wordsworth, by Elbert Hubbard", "Wordsworth's Poetry, Delivered Extempore At Manchester, by George Macdonald", "In Wordsworth's Country, by John Burroughs", "William Wordsworth, by Henry Cabot Lodge & Francis W. Halsey", "Wordsworth, by Walter Horatio Pater", "The English Lakes, by F. W. H. Myers", "Wordsworth, by John Morley", etc. William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was an English Romantic poet famous for helping to usher in the Romantic Age in English literature with the publication of "Lyrical Ballads" (1798), which he co-wrote with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His best known work is perhaps "The Prelude", a semi-autobiographical poem from his early years which was changed and expanded many times throughout his life. He was poet laureate of Britain between 1843 until his death in 1850.

WORDSWORTH’S POETRY.

DELIVERED
EXTEMPORE AT MANCHESTER.

By George Macdonald

The history of the poetry of Wordsworth is a true reflex of the man himself. The life of Wordsworth was not outwardly eventful, but his inner life was full of conflict, discovery, and progress. His outward life seems to have been so ordered by Providence as to favour the development of the poetic life within. Educated in the country, and spending most of his life in the society of nature, he was not subjected to those violent external changes which have been the lot of some poets. Perfectly fitted as he was to cope with the world, and to fight his way to any desired position, he chose to retire from it, and in solitude to work out what appeared to him to be the true destiny of his life.

The very element in which the mind of Wordsworth lived and moved was a Christian pantheism. Allow me to explain the word. The poets of the Old Testament speak of everything as being the work of God’s hand:—We are the “work of his hand;” “The world was made by him.” But in the New Testament there is a higher form used to express the relation in which we stand to him—“We are his offspring;” not the work of his hand, but the children that came forth from his heart. Our own poet Goldsmith, with the high instinct of genius, speaks of God as having “loved us into being.” Now I think this is not only true with regard to man, but true likewise with regard to the world in which we live. This world is not merely a thing which God hath made, subjecting it to laws; but it is an expression of the thought, the feeling, the heart of God himself. And so it must be; because, if man be the child of God, would he not feel to be out of his element if he lived in a world which came, not from the heart of God, but only from his hand? This Christian pantheism, this belief that God is in everything, and showing himself in everything, has been much brought to the light by the poets of the past generation, and has its influence still, I hope, upon the poets of the present. We are not satisfied that the world should be a proof and varying indication of the intellect of God. That was how Paley viewed it. He taught us to believe there is a God from the mechanism of the world. But, allowing all the argument to be quite correct, what does it prove? A mechanical God, and nothing more.

Let us go further; and, looking at beauty, believe that God is the first of artists; that he has put beauty into nature, knowing how it will affect us, and intending that it should so affect us; that he has embodied his own grand thoughts thus that we might see them and be glad. Then, let us go further still, and believe that whatever we feel in the highest moments of truth shining through beauty, whatever comes to our souls as a power of life, is meant to be seen and felt by us, and to be regarded not as the work of his hand, but as the flowing forth of his heart, the flowing forth of his love of us, making us blessed in the union of his heart and ours.

Now, Wordsworth is the high priest of nature thus regarded. He saw God present everywhere; not always immediately, in his own form, it is true; but whether he looked upon the awful mountain-peak, sky-encompassed with loveliness, or upon the face of a little child, which is as it were eyes in the face of nature—in all things he felt the solemn presence of the Divine Spirit. By Keats this presence was recognized only as the spirit of beauty; to Wordsworth, God, as the Spirit of Truth, was manifested through the forms of the external world.

I have said that the life of Wordsworth was so ordered as to bring this out of him, in the forms of his art, to the ears of men. In childhood even his conscience was partly developed through the influences of nature upon him. He thus retrospectively describes this special influence of nature:—

One summer evening (led by her) I found

A little boat, tied to a willow tree,

Within a rocky cave, its usual home.

Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in,

Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth,

And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice

Of mountain echoes did my boat move on,

Leaving behind her still, on either side,

Small ...

Table of contents

• WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
• WM. WORDSWORTH.
• WORDSWORTH’S POETRY.
• IN WORDSWORTH'S COUNTRY.
• WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
• WORDSWORTH.
• THE ENGLISH LAKES.
• WORDSWORTH.
• WORDSWORTH'S ETHICS.
• TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
• TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.
• APPRECIATIONS.
• THE LAND OF WORDSWORTH.