In a sequence of posts I’m exploring the competing visions of nature within the work of William Wordsworth and Charles Darwin (discover the total sequence right here). Even in his lifetime Wordsworth was to grow to be one thing of a guru. Most of the nice and good in Victorian England, resembling George Eliot and even the satisfied spiritual sceptic Harriet Martineau, visited him in his distant dwelling of Dove Cottage. When John Stuart Mill made his acquaintance with Wordsworth’s work in 1828 he reported feeling freed from the low-level despair that had lengthy plagued him.1 The influential critic and chaplain to Queen Victoria, Stopford Brooke, delivered a sequence of lectures in 1872 wherein he praised Wordswoth’s private view of nature, contrasting it with Alexander Pope’s 18th-century mechanical conception:
However who is that this particular person? Is she solely the creation of creativeness, having no substantive actuality past the thoughts of Wordsworth? No, she is the poetic impersonation of an precise Being, the shape which the poet offers to the dwelling Spirit of God within the outward world.2
As F. W. H. Myers justly commented, “Wordsworth’s exponents are usually not content material to deal with his poems on Nature merely as sleek descriptive items, however converse of him in phrases normally reserved for the originators of some nice spiritual motion.”3
A In style Revolution
Myers made the additional level that Wordsworth gave rise not simply to a minority group of high-culture admirers however to a well-liked revolution in odd individuals’s considering:
Due to this fact it’s that Wordsworth is honored; as a result of to so many males — detached it might be to literary or poetical results as such — he has proven by the delicate depth of his personal emotion how the contemplation of Nature could be made a revealing company, like Love or Prayer — a gap if certainly there be any opening, into the transcendent world.4
The truth that Wordsworth’s Information to the Lakes was a bestseller is in itself a sign of his in style enchantment to every kind and circumstances of Britons. As Bate places it, “In Wordsworth’s youth, genteel vacationers got here to the Lake District looking for the picturesque. After the arrival of the railway, the city and dealing lessons got here looking for Wordsworth.”5
Notes
- For an account of Wordsworth’s later affect see Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Modified the World (London: HarperCollins, 2020), pp. 449-479. Probably the most exhaustive account of reception was supplied in Robert M. Ryan’s Charles Darwin and the Church of Wordsworth (Oxford: OUP, 2016).
- Stopford Brooke, Theology within the English Poets: Cowper, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Burns [1872] (London: Dent, 1910), p. 79.
- F. W. H. Myers, Wordsworth [1881] (repr. Hamburg: Tredition, 2012), p. 113.
- Myers, Wordsworth, p. 118.
- Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth, p. 464.
