The Revolution allured him it would be some time before he realized that it had beguiled him. John’s College, Cambridge, he was ripe for radicalization. When Wordsworth and a friend undertook a walking tour of France in 1790, during the summer vacation from St. The French Revolution, which erupted in 1789, shaped his youthful political understanding more than any other event in public life. In the pride of early manhood Wordsworth declared himself “of that odious class of men called democrats,” and his best poetry was steeped in democratic sentiments.
The nobleman’s indifference to fundamental justice and to the plight of his underling’s family blackened young William’s disposition toward the high and mighty. Only after Sir James died in 1802 was the Wordsworths’ claim settled, by a more honorable scion, for more than £10,000. When John Wordsworth died in 1784, William and his orphaned siblings were left homeless-various relatives were to take them in-and it transpired that Sir James owed the Wordsworth estate more than £4,500, a very large sum at the time, for expenses John had incurred in conducting his master’s affairs. His father, John, was the factotum-at-law of the wealthy and powerful Sir James Lowther, Lord Lonsdale, a political potentate as venal and ethically malodorous as a Chicago alderman, described by one who knew him as “truly a Madman, tho’ too Rich to be confin’d.” One can imagine Sir James as rendered by William Hogarth or James Gillray, all unctuous corpulence and toothy smile. William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born in the small town of Cockermouth, on the northernmost fringe of the Lake District in the northwest of England. What he said conjoined with how he said it to produce “The still, sad music of humanity.” And Wordsworth’s substance was as revelatory as his style. This vernacular eloquence exercised a tremendous influence on modern poetry, opening up “democratic vistas,” in Walt Whitman’s pregnant phrase. Wordsworth perfected an artful use of plain, everyday speech, overturning the tradition of ornate diction in poetry. Now he, along with Shakespeare and perhaps John Milton, belongs to the exclusive company of English poets whose names even the minimally educated are almost certain to have heard. He was the greatest of the English Romantics, innovative in form and content, yet with a lasting influence on the conservative sensibility in culture and politics.
But with a body of poetic work about nature both gentle and fearsome, wandering beggars with “a spirit and pulse of good,” stout-hearted leech-gatherers on the lonely moor, the “visionary gleam” of childhood perception that intimates the soul’s immortality, and the poet’s attempt to recover that elusive wonder, Wordsworth won an admiring readership in the early years of the nineteenth century.
On its own, a little ditty like this does not earn a poet a formidable reputation. The poet comes upon “a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils.” The flowers flutter and dance before him, their petals like “stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way.” And when the poet retires to his couch and solitary reverie, his “heart with pleasure fills / And dances with the daffodils.” I wandered lonely as a cloud.” So begins a famous poem of William Wordsworth’s, one that was often taught to schoolchildren back when memorizing poetry was part of education.
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