| 威廉·華茲華斯 | |||
閱讀華茲華斯 William Wordsworth在诗海的作品!!! | |||
华兹华斯華茲華斯詩歌創作的黃金時期在1797～1807年。隨着聲譽逐漸上升，他的創作逐漸走嚮衰退。到了1830年，他的成就已得到普遍承認，1843年被封為英國桂冠詩人。由於他與柯爾律治等詩人常居住在英國西北部多山的湖區，1807年10月的《愛丁堡評論》雜志稱他們是湖畔派詩人。
早期詩歌《晚步》和《素描集》中，對大自然的描寫基本上未超出18世紀的傳統。然而，從《抒情歌謠集》開始，一反18世紀的詩風，將一種嶄新的風格帶到詩歌創作中，開創了英國文學史上浪漫主義詩歌的新時代。他為《抒情歌謠集》的再版所寫的序言被認為是浪漫主義文學的宣言。他的作品還有《不朽的徵兆》以及由《序麯》和《漫遊》兩部分組成的哲理性長詩《隱者》等。
1770年4月7日，威廉·華茲華斯（William Wordsworth）出生在英國坎伯蘭郡的考剋茅斯。華茲華斯排行第二，上有一個哥哥，下有一個妹妹和兩個弟弟。其父是個律師。華茲華斯8歲喪母，13歲喪父，少年時期一直在幾傢親戚的監護之下，住在寄宿學校中，與兄弟姐妹們分開生活。五個孩子從父親那裏繼承的遺産主要是對一位貴族的8500鎊的債權。但這貴族在1802年去世之前，一直不願償還這筆錢，可以說，華茲華斯青少年時期的生活是十分貧寒的。但是他生活地區的美麗自然風光，療救和補償了他在物質與親情上的缺失，因而華茲華斯的對早年的回憶並不覺得貧苦。他對自然有着“虔誠的愛”，將自然看成是自己的精神傢園。受學校老師的影響，開始寫詩。華茲華斯的第一首詩歌完成於1784年。
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1787年他進入劍橋大學聖約翰學院學習，熟讀了希臘拉丁文學，學習意大利文、法文和西班牙文。1790年和1791年兩次赴法。當時正是法國大革命的年代，年輕的華茲華斯對革命深表同情與嚮往。回國後不久，局勢劇變，華茲華斯對法國大革命感到失望。1795年，他和妹妹多蘿茜以及詩人柯勒律治居住在北部山地的湖區，並在此消磨了一生。1798年華茲華斯與柯勒律治共同發表了《抒情歌謠集》，1800年這部詩集再版時華茲華斯寫了序言。
《抒情歌謠集》出版時，華茲華斯並未受到重視，《序言》出版後，更遭到批評傢的反對。1807年他的兩捲集出版時仍受到批評界的攻擊。但從19世紀初葉起，他在詩歌上的成就逐漸得到承認，激進派詩人如利·亨特也稱他為頌揚大自然的新型詩歌的開創者和領袖，說他的詩取代了18世紀矯揉造作的詩風。人們認為《抒情歌謠集》宣告了浪漫主義新詩的誕生。在藝術上華茲華斯對雪萊、拜倫和濟慈都有影響。
1843年被封為英國“桂冠詩人”，為宮廷寫了不少應景詩，藝術成就大不如前。
1850 年4月23日去世。
主要作品有《抒情歌謠集》、《序麯》、《遠遊》等。
Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, an autobiographical poem of his early years which the poet revised and expanded a number of times. The work was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
Early life and education
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth in Cumberland—part of the scenic region in north-west England called the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year. After the death of their mother in 1778, their father sent William to Hawkshead Grammar School and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She and William did not meet again for another nine years. His father died when he was 13.
Wordsworth began attending St John's College, Cambridge in 1787, maintained by his maternal grandparents. He returned to Hawkshead for his first two summer holidays, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790, he took a nearly three thousand mile walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and also visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy. It is also said that he visited China to learn the language of the Samurai, but sources are inconclusive. The following year, he graduated from Cambridge without distinction. His youngest brother, Christopher, rose to be Master of Trinity College.
Relationship with Annette Vallon
In November 1791, Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France and became enthralled with the Republican movement. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave birth to their child, Caroline. Because of lack of money and Britain's tensions with France, he returned alone to England the next year. The circumstances of his return and his subsequent behaviour raise doubts as to his declared wish to marry Annette but he supported her and his daughter as best he could in later life. During this period, he wrote his acclaimed "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," recalling his seaside walk with his daughter, whom he had not seen for ten years. At the conception of this poem, he had never seen his daughter before. The occurring lines reveal his deep love for both child and mother. The Reign of Terror estranged him from the Republican movement, and war between France and Britain prevented him from seeing Annette and Caroline again for several years. There are also strong suggestions that Wordsworth may have been depressed and emotionally unsettled in the mid 1790s.
With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802 Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy visited Annette and Caroline in France and arrived at a mutually agreeable settlement regarding Wordsworth's obligations.
First publication and Lyrical Ballads
In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" which is called the 'manifest' of English Romantic criticism, Wordsworth calls his poems ' Experimental'. 1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He received a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing poetry. That year, he also met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, moved to Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement. The volume had neither the name of Wordsworth nor Coleridge as the author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as the author, and included a preface to the poems, which was significantly augmented in the 1802 edition. This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry askeets "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquility." A fourth and final edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805.
Germany and move to the Lake District
Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge then travelled to Germany in the autumn of 1798. While Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the trip, its main effect on Wordsworth was to produce homesickness. During the harsh winter of 1798–1799, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in Goslar, and despite extreme stress and loneliness, he began work on an autobiographical piece later titled The Prelude. He also wrote a number of famous poems, including "the Lucy poems". He and his sister moved back to England, now to Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District, and this time with fellow poet Robert Southey nearby. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey came to be known as the "Lake Poets". Through this period, many of his poems revolve around themes of death, endurance, separation, and grief.
William Wordsworth
Portrait, 1842, by Benjamin Haydon
Marriage and Children
In 1802, after returning from his trip to France with Dorothy to visit Annette and Caroline, Wordsworth received the inheritance owed by Lord Lonsdale since John Wordsworth's death in 1783. Later that year, he married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children.
John Wordsworth - June 18th 1803 - 1875. Married four times: 1) Isabella Curwen (d. 1848)had six children: Jane, Henry, William, John, Charles and Edward. 2) Helen Ross (d. 1854) no issue. 3) Mary Ann Dolan (d. after 1856) had 1 daughter Dora (b.1858). 4) Mary Gamble. no issue
Dora Wordsworth - August 16th 1804 - July 9th 1847. She married Edward Quillinan
Thomas Wordsworth - June 15th 1806 - December 1st 1812
Catherine Wordsworth - September 6th 1808 - June 4th 1812
William "Willy" Wordsworth - May 12th 1810 - 1883. He married Fanny Graham and had four children: Mary Louisa, William, Reginald and Gordon.
Autobiographical work and Poems in Two Volumes
Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call The Recluse. He had in 1798–99 started an autobiographical poem, which he never named but called the "poem to Coleridge", which would serve as an appendix to The Recluse. In 1804 he began expanding this autobiographical work, having decided to make it a prologue rather than an appendix to the larger work he planned. By 1805, he had completed it, but refused to publish such a personal work until he had completed the whole of The Recluse. The death of his brother, John, in 1805 affected him strongly.
The source of Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances as articulated in The Prelude and in such shorter works as "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey" has been the source of much critical debate. While it had long been supposed that Wordsworth relied chiefly on Coleridge for philosophical guidance, more recent scholarship has suggested that Wordsworth's ideas may have been formed years before he and Coleridge became friends in the mid 1790s. While in Revolutionary Paris in 1792, the twenty-two year old Wordsworth made the acquaintance of the mysterious traveller John "Walking" Stewart (1747-1822), who was nearing the end of a thirty-years' peregrination from Madras, India, through Persia and Arabia, across Africa and all of Europe, and up through the fledgling United States. By the time of their association, Stewart had published an ambitious work of original materialist philosophy entitled The Apocalypse of Nature (London, 1791), to which many of Wordsworth's philosophical sentiments are likely indebted.
In 1807, his Poems in Two Volumes were published, including "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Up to this point Wordsworth was known publicly only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this collection would cement his reputation. Its reception was lukewarm, however. For a time (starting in 1810), Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction. Two of his children, Thomas and Catherine, died in 1812. The following year, he received an appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, and the £400 per year income from the post made him financially secure. His family, including Dorothy, moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside (between Grasmere and Rydal Water) in 1813, where he spent the rest of his life.
The Prospectus
In 1814 he published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part The Recluse. He had not completed the first and third parts, and never would complete them. However, he did write a poetic Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he lays out the structure and intent of the poem. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature:
My voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external World
Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,
Theme this but little heard of among Men,
The external World is fitted to the Mind...
Some modern critics recognise a decline in his works beginning around the mid-1810s. But this decline was perhaps more a change in his lifestyle and beliefs, since most of the issues that characterise his early poetry (loss, death, endurance, separation, abandonment) were resolved in his writings. But, by 1820 he enjoyed the success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works. By 1828, Wordsworth had become fully reconciled to Coleridge, and the two toured the Rhineland together that year. Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 that rendered her an invalid for the remainder of her life. In 1835, Wordsworth gave Annette and Caroline the money they needed for support.
The Poet Laureate and other honours
Wordsworth received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from Durham University, and the same honour from Oxford University the next year. In 1842 the government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300 a year. With the death in 1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became the Poet Laureate. When his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry came to a standstill.
Death
Gravestone of William Wordsworth, Grasmere, CumbriaWilliam Wordsworth died of pneumonia on the 23rd April 1850 and was buried at St. Oswald's church in Grasmere. His widow Mary published his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death. Though this failed to arouse great interest in 1850, it has since come to be recognised as his masterpiece.
Major works
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798)
"Simon Lee"
"We Are Seven"
"Lines Written in Early Spring"
"Expostulation and Reply"
"The Tables Turned"
"The Thorn"
"Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"
Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800)
Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
"Strange fits of passion have I known"
"She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways"
"Three years she grew"
"A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal"
"I travelled among unknown men"
"Lucy Gray"
"The Two April Mornings"
"Nutting"
"The Ruined Cottage"
"Michael"
Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
"Resolution and Independence"
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"
"My Heart Leaps Up"
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
"Ode to Duty"
"The Solitary Reaper"
"Elegiac Stanzas"
"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"
"London, 1802"
"The world is too much with us"
The Excursion (1814)
"Prospectus to The Recluse"
Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822)
"Mutability"
The Prelude (1850, posthumous)
The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind
Notes
^ http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/William_Wordsworth
^ Appendix A (Past Governors) of Allport, D.H. & Friskney, N.J. "A Short History of Wilson's School", Wilson's School Charitable Trust, 1987
^ a b c d e f g h Everett, Glenn, "William Wordsworth: Biography" Web page at The Victorian Web Web site, accessed January 7, 2007
^ Kelly Grovier, "Dream Walker: A Wordsworth Mystery Solved", Times Literary Supplement, 16 February 2007
^ a b c d e M. H. Abrams, editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period, writes of these five poems: "This and the four following pieces are often grouped by editors as the 'Lucy poems,' even though 'A slumber did my spirit seal' does not identify the 'she' who is the subject of that poem. All but the last were written in 1799, while Wordsworth and his sister were in Germany, and homesick. There has been diligent speculation about the identity of Lucy, but it remains speculation. The one certainty is that she is not the girl of Wordsworth's 'Lucy Gray'" (Abrams 2000).
Sources
M. H. Abrams, ed. (2000), The Norton Anthology of English Literatures: Volume 2A, The Romantic Period (7th ed.), New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., ISBN 0-393-97568-1
Stephen Gill, ed. (2000), William Wordsworth: The Major Works, New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., ISBN 0-19-284044-4