ROMANTICISM

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

It was in 1797 that the new romantic movement in our literature assumed
definite form. Wordsworth and Coleridge retired to the Quantock Hills,
Somerset, and there formed the deliberate purpose to make literature
"adapted to interest mankind permanently," which, they declared, classic
poetry could never do. Helping the two poets was Wordsworth's sister
Dorothy, with a woman's love for flowers and all beautiful things; and a
woman's divine sympathy for human life even in its lowliest forms. Though a
silent partner, she furnished perhaps the largest share of the inspiration
which resulted in the famous _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798. In their
partnership Coleridge was to take up the "supernatural, or at least
romantic"; while Wordsworth was "to give the charm of novelty to things of
everyday ... by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom
and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us."
The whole spirit of their work is reflected in two poems of this remarkable
little volume, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which is Coleridge's
masterpiece, and "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," which
expresses Wordsworth's poetical creed, and which is one of the noblest and
most significant of our poems. That the _Lyrical Ballads_ attracted no
attention,[220] and was practically ignored by a public that would soon go
into raptures over Byron's _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_, is of small
consequence. Many men will hurry a mile to see skyrockets, who never notice
Orion and the Pleiades from their own doorstep. Had Wordsworth and
Coleridge written only this one little book, they would still be among the
representative writers of an age that proclaimed the final triumph of
Romanticism.

LIFE OF WORDSWORTH. To understand the life of him who, in Tennyson's words,
"uttered nothing base," it is well to read first _The Prelude_, which
records the impressions made upon Wordsworth's mind from his earliest
recollection until his full manhood, in 1805, when the poem was
completed.[221] Outwardly his long and uneventful life divides itself
naturally into four periods: (1) his childhood and youth, in the Cumberland
Hills, from 1770 to 1787; (2) a period of uncertainty, of storm and stress,
including his university life at Cambridge, his travels abroad, and his
revolutionary experience, from 1787 to 1797; (3) a short but significant
period of finding h