William Wordsworth Biography

Encyclopedia of World Biography on William Wordsworth

Although William Wordsworth is now regarded as the central poet of his age, during his lifetime Byron or Scott, and later Tennyson, received more popular acclaim. Even readers in the nineteenth century who argued for Wordsworth's centrality did so on grounds different from those of many twentieth-century critics. For Matthew Arnold, who wanted to bolster Wordsworth's reputation late in the Victorian period, Wordsworth was the great lyrical poet of nature, spontaneity, and affirmation. Readers in this century, such as Geoffrey Hartman, have found Wordsworth's poetry powerful because of the tensions and contradictions which disturb its sometimes deceptively smooth surfaces. According to this reading of "Wordsworth," the poetry is a site of doubt and conflict, a view recently supported by critics interested in Wordsworth's ideological commitments. The view of Wordsworth as a conflicted and complicated poet whose works document the major events and concerns of his age—the French Revolution and the rise of counterrevolutionary tyranny, the effects of urbanization, mass communication, and war, the desires and limitations of the human mind—appeals particularly to latetwentieth- century readers.

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