0,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 2,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 2,49 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
F. W. H. Myers' "Wordsworth" is a profound exploration of the life and poetic philosophy of William Wordsworth, situated within the Romantic literary context that values nature, emotion, and the intimate connection between humanity and the natural world. Myers employs a rich, reflective prose style that mirrors the lyrical quality of Wordsworth's own works. By meticulously analyzing key poems and biographical elements, Myers articulates the essential themes of innocence, experience, and the transcendental aspects of the human spirit that permeate Wordsworth's writing, thereby offering readers a deep appreciation of his contributions to English literature. As a noted Victorian poet and scholar, F. W. H. Myers was profoundly influenced by the Romantic movement, which led him to delve into the lives of its seminal figures. His nuanced understanding of Wordsworth's struggles with societal norms and personal loss lends depth to his interpretations, while Myers' own poetic sensibilities resonate throughout the text, creating a dynamic interplay between author and subject. "Wordsworth" is essential for anyone seeking to delve deeper into the nuances of Romantic poetry or the philosophical underpinnings of Wordsworth's work. Myers' penetrating insights and articulate prose provide both a scholarly resource and an enjoyable read, ensuring that both students and lovers of poetry will find inspiration within its pages. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
Ähnliche
Wordsworth
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the heart of this study lies the claim that a poet’s inward life can shape a culture’s moral imagination through sustained attention to nature and the textures of ordinary experience. F. W. H. Myers’s Wordsworth offers a finely drawn portrait of William Wordsworth as both man and maker, presenting a critical narrative that follows the poet from youthful aspiration to mature conviction. Without sensationalism or speculation, Myers concentrates on what can be known and read, tracing the interplay between life events and artistic development. The result is an approachable, reflective companion that seeks to clarify how a distinctive voice emerged and why it still matters.
This book belongs to the tradition of literary biography and criticism, written for general readers who want a reliable guide to a major writer. First published in 1881 by Macmillan as part of the English Men of Letters series, edited by John Morley, it participates in the late nineteenth century’s effort to synthesize life and letters. Its subject is the Romantic poet whose career spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the Lake District as a recurring locus of creative energy. Myers situates Wordsworth within that historical and geographical frame, attentive to how time and place helped shape enduring poetic aims.
Readers encounter a measured, lucid voice that balances narrative with analysis. Myers sketches the outline of Wordsworth’s life and then dwells on key poems and ideas, offering a reading experience that is calm, precise, and steadily cumulative rather than polemical. The mood is contemplative; the style is compact, avoiding technical jargon while keeping a firm critical grasp. Instead of exhaustive documentation, the book provides a curated pathway through pivotal moments and works, designed to orient newcomers and refine the understanding of seasoned readers alike. It promises an immersion in the tone and temperament of a writer for whom thought and feeling were inseparable.
Central themes emerge with clarity: nature as a morally inflected presence; memory as the ground of identity; the education of the senses; and the tension between visionary impulse and everyday duty. Myers shows how Wordsworth’s commitment to common life—its speech, its labor, its quiet heroism—supports a poetics of simplicity that aspires to profundity. He considers the poet’s trust in continuity across change, the patient gathering of insight from solitude, and the ethical demands that follow from heightened perception. These themes are presented not as slogans but as working principles that animate the poems and lend coherence to a long and varied career.
Methodologically, the book exemplifies Victorian critical practice at its best: historically alert, morally serious, and grounded in close engagement with texts. Myers relates biographical circumstance to artistic choice without reducing art to biography, and he places Wordsworth among contemporaries in ways that clarify, rather than diminish, individual achievement. He is attentive to development over time, noting how early enthusiasms crystallize into later principles. Where judgments are offered, they rest on observable features—diction, structure, recurring motifs—rather than conjecture. The effect is to model a form of reading that respects evidence while allowing room for the intuitions that great poetry inevitably invites.
For today’s readers, the book retains a striking relevance. It speaks to ongoing debates about how literature envisions the relationship between person and environment, private feeling and public responsibility. Myers’s emphasis on attentiveness—to place, to memory, to the unnoticed—is consonant with contemporary concerns about care, sustainability, and the value of the ordinary. The study also demonstrates how criticism can deepen pleasure: by naming patterns without flattening mystery, and by connecting aesthetic experience to ethical reflection. In an era of accelerated reading, its steady pace offers a counterexample, inviting a slower, more receptive engagement with language and the world it evokes.
Approached as an introduction, Wordsworth provides orientation to the poet’s life, a map of the major works, and a thoughtful account of the ideas that organize them. It is neither a comprehensive archive nor a narrow thesis, but a clear, durable guide that encourages readers to return to the poems themselves. Those new to the poet will find context and direction; those already familiar may discover fresh coherence in well-known pages. Myers ultimately argues, by demonstration rather than decree, that careful reading can enlarge sympathy and judgment. In doing so, his book becomes not only about Wordsworth, but also about how to read with care.
Synopsis
F. W. H. Myers’s Wordsworth offers a compact biography and critical study of William Wordsworth within the English Men of Letters series. Myers combines narrative of the poet’s life with analysis of his works and ideas, presenting the development of Wordsworth’s art alongside his intellectual convictions. Drawing on letters, journals, and contemporary accounts, he frames Wordsworth as a poet whose central preoccupation is the moral and spiritual significance of nature and ordinary life. The book proceeds chronologically, tracing formative experiences, major publications, and evolving doctrines, and concludes with an estimate of influence and legacy, seeking to define both the scope and limits of Wordsworth’s achievement.
Myers begins with Wordsworth’s early years in Cumberland, emphasizing the Lake District’s lasting imprint on his imagination. Schooling at Hawkshead encouraged independence and close observation of rural life, while Cambridge brought little distinction but widened experience. Early walking tours fostered a habit of solitary reflection and attachment to landscape. The role of Dorothy Wordsworth is noted as central in feeling and memory. Early poems show descriptive skill but tentative purpose. Myers introduces the notion of powerful, formative “spots of time” to explain how early impressions shaped the poet’s later method, setting the foundation for a poetry rooted in remembered emotion and natural communion.
The narrative turns to Wordsworth’s Continental travels and encounter with the French Revolution. Initially sympathetic to its ideals, he spent time in France, formed a relationship with Annette Vallon, and embraced hopes for social renewal. Political turmoil and the Reign of Terror, however, led to disillusion and inner conflict. Returning to England amid financial uncertainty, he published Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk, works that reveal a developing voice. A legacy from Raisley Calvert enabled independent work. Reunited with Dorothy in 1795, he settled first at Racedown and then at Alfoxden, where a decisive companionship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge began.
Myers highlights the 1797–1798 collaboration with Coleridge as a turning point. In Somerset they planned a new kind of poetry, culminating in Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection that redirected English verse toward ordinary life and plain diction. Wordsworth’s contributions advocate language “really used by men” and the principle of emotion recollected in tranquillity. The preface, expanded in later editions, articulates his poetic theory and purpose. Poems such as Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey exemplify the fusion of memory, nature, and moral insight. A sojourn in Germany followed, deepening study and providing further material for sustained philosophical reflection.
The return to the Lakes in 1799 initiated the Grasmere years at Dove Cottage, a period of concentrated creation. Dorothy’s journals recorded shared perceptions that fed Wordsworth’s verse. Marriage to Mary Hutchinson in 1802 consolidated a domestic setting supportive of his work. Myers surveys the poems of this time, including the Lucy sequence, Michael, Resolution and Independence, and the Ode: Intimations of Immortality. He identifies recurrent themes: the educative power of nature, the dignity of humble lives, and the redemptive function of memory. Wordsworth’s style seeks gravity without ornament, aiming to disclose a spiritual order beneath daily experience.
A central portion of Myers’s study addresses The Prelude, completed in 1805 but published posthumously. Conceived as the autobiographical introduction to a larger philosophical poem, The Recluse, it traces the “growth of a poet’s mind” through episodes where nature disciplines and enlarges imagination. Myers outlines its structure and emblematic scenes, then summarizes the poem’s central claim: that meaningful poetry arises from the interaction of mind and external world, mediated by memory and imagination. He treats The Prelude as Wordsworth’s most coherent statement of his poetic vocation, linking personal history with a general theory of spiritual development.
Myers next considers The Excursion (1814), a philosophical dialogue that brought mixed reception for its breadth and didactic tone. He notes the figures of the Wanderer, Solitary, and Pastor as vehicles for meditation on faith, loss, and endurance. Subsequent works, including the Ecclesiastical Sonnets and various odes and sonnets, reflect maturing conservatism and a religious temper more settled than earlier speculation. Practical circumstances—appointment as Distributor of Stamps, removal to Rydal Mount—coincide with a gradual decline in imaginative power. Family events and bereavements mark the later years. Wordsworth became Poet Laureate in 1843 and died in 1850.
In his general estimate, Myers balances praise and reservation. He credits Wordsworth with renewing English poetry through sincerity, simplicity, and a moral seriousness attentive to common life. He notes limitations: diffuseness, occasional prosaic passages, and a restricted dramatic range. Comparisons clarify distinctions—Coleridge’s speculative agility, Byron’s energy, Shelley’s idealism—while affirming Wordsworth’s unique authority in meditative and descriptive modes. Myers examines the doctrine of imagination, the reform of poetic diction, and the poet’s influence on later writers and critics. He records a trajectory from early neglect and satire to broad recognition, shaping Victorian sensibility and beyond.
Myers concludes that Wordsworth’s permanent value lies in his witness to the unity between human consciousness and the natural world, and in a poetry that educates feeling and conscience. Certain lyrics, odes, and passages of sustained reflection are presented as imperishable achievements, independent of the unevenness elsewhere. The book’s final chapters reaffirm Wordsworth’s place within English letters as a poet of healing insight and moral steadiness. Without advocating doctrine, Myers synthesizes life, work, and influence into a coherent account, leaving the reader with a clear sense of the poet’s aims, methods, and enduring contribution to modern thought and art.
Historical Context
F. W. H. Myers’s Wordsworth, published in London in 1881 within the English Men of Letters series, situates its subject amid the upheavals of Britain and Europe between 1770 and 1850. The book’s geographical focus moves from Cockermouth in Cumberland and the Lake District’s Grasmere and Rydal to London and Revolutionary France, foregrounding how landscapes and polities shaped a poet’s civic conscience. Myers writes from late-Victorian Cambridge and London, viewing the revolutionary era, the Napoleonic struggle, and the early industrial age through a moral-historical lens. Thus the work is effectively set in two frames: Wordsworth’s Britain and France across six decades, and the author’s own 1880s Britain, reflecting back with documentary sobriety.
The book opens onto the revolutionary threshold: Wordsworth’s youth in Cumberland after 1770, schooling at Hawkshead, and Cambridge years at St John’s College (1787–1791) form the prelude to encounters with a continent in ferment. In 1790 he walked across France and the Alps as the Bastille’s fall (1789) and the August Decrees still reverberated. He returned to France in 1791, residing in Orléans and Blois, sympathetic to moderate republican hopes. Myers traces these movements with topographical precision, showing how the Lake District’s customary life and French municipal politics together informed Wordsworth’s early political attachments and set the stage for the reckonings of 1793–1794.
No single historical event shapes Myers’s narrative more than the French Revolution and its violent turn. He outlines the sequence: the Estates-General convened in May 1789; the storming of the Bastille on 14 July; the Declaration of the Rights of Man in August; and the Constitution of 1791. War with Austria began in April 1792, followed by the September Massacres and the proclamation of the Republic. Louis XVI was executed on 21 January 1793, and the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre presided over the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) with the Law of Suspects and revolutionary tribunals. Wordsworth lived in Orléans and Blois in 1791–1792, formed a liaison with Annette Vallon, and their daughter Caroline was born in 1792. When France declared war on Britain on 1 February 1793, the Channel closed him off from France, intensifying personal and political turmoil. Myers links this enforced separation and the Terror’s spectacles—executions, civil war in the Vendée, coercive economic decrees—to Wordsworth’s crisis of faith in abstract revolutionary dogma. He also attends to the Revolution’s Atlantic dimension, noting Napoleon’s seizure of Toussaint Louverture in 1802 and the Haitian struggle (1791–1804), to which Wordsworth responded in his 1802 sonnet to Toussaint. Thermidor (July 1794) ended the Terror, but for Myers the ethical wound remained: the book’s chapters anatomize, with dates and places, how the early republican idealism of Orléans gave way to a chastened English patriotism grounded in local duty, legal restraint, and continuity.
The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) anchor the next phase. The Peace of Amiens (March 1802–May 1803) briefly reopened borders, allowing Wordsworth and Dorothy to meet Annette and Caroline at Calais before he married Mary Hutchinson at Grasmere in October 1802. Naval and military mobilization intensified as Napoleon crowned himself Emperor in 1804. Personal calamity intersected with national anxiety when Wordsworth’s brother John died on 5 February 1805 in the wreck of the East Indiaman Earl of Abergavenny off Weymouth. Myers treats these years as the matrix of a measured patriotism: in 1809 Wordsworth denounced the 1808 Convention of Cintra in a political pamphlet, and after Waterloo (1815) his civic thanksgiving is read as hard-won, not jingoistic.
Agrarian transformation under the Enclosure Acts is presented as a slow, often brutal revolution at home. The General Enclosure Act (1801) facilitated the privatization of commons across counties including Westmorland and Cumberland, displacing smallholders and reshaping customary rights. Earlier crises—the bad harvests and bread riots of 1795, the Speenhamland relief system of that same year—had already strained rural life, while the Corn Laws (from 1815) inflamed class tensions. As Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland (1813–1842), Wordsworth travelled widely among dales and market towns, observing tenants, discharged soldiers, and vagrants. Myers uses these observations to anchor a historically specific social conscience in the poetry, while emphasizing Wordsworth’s skepticism toward sweeping, abstract remedies.
Industrialization and transport expansion transform the book’s northern landscapes. Cotton mills grew across Lancashire from the late eighteenth century, with machine-breaking and Luddite disturbances peaking in 1812. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830, inaugurating a railway age that soon threatened the Lake District’s quiet. Tourism surged after 1815, and villas crowded Windermere’s shores. Wordsworth responded with a preservationist ethos in his Guide to the Lakes (first issued 1810; expanded 1835), urging protection of vernacular building and pasture patterns. Myers highlights the 1844 Kendal and Windermere Railway bill, against which Wordsworth published sonnets opposing track-laying into the vales. He reads this as early environmental advocacy rooted in concrete local governance debates and parliamentary dates.
Myers threads British reform and protest into Wordsworth’s political evolution. The Peterloo Massacre at Manchester (16 August 1819) exposed the volatility of mass meetings and magistrates’ force. The Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829) and the Reform Act (1832) reconfigured civil and parliamentary life, while the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) centralized relief in workhouses that many decried as punitive. Chartism (1838–1848) pressed for universal male suffrage and annual parliaments, with national petitions in 1839, 1842, and 1848. Myers shows Wordsworth’s positions—loyal to the established Church, wary of mass agitation, yet critical of bureaucratic harshness—as historically grounded responses, citing officeholding dates (1813–1842) and the laureateship conferred in 1843.
As social and political critique, Myers’s book contends that Wordsworth’s life exemplifies a principled resistance to both revolutionary terror and laissez-faire indifference. By correlating specific events—the Terror’s tribunals, the 1805 shipwreck, Peterloo, the 1834 New Poor Law, and the 1844 railway proposal—with Wordsworth’s public interventions, Myers exposes the era’s central fractures: state violence, displacement under enclosure, industrial despoliation, and class exclusion from representation. The study advocates stewardship of land and institutions, reform without iconoclasm, and humane administration over doctrinaire schemes. In doing so, it indicts the age’s injustices while arguing that durable liberty is secured through local obligations and historically tested civic forms.
