The Magnificant Lake Poets
Gwen HERAT
Their imperishable thoughts are eternally enshrined in the books of
the world. From 1790s to 1800s published poems had subject spirit and
widened the outlook and influenced the English verse.
It was developed by the greatest of the poets, William Wordsworth
because of his relationship with nature. For more than 400 hundred
years, gleams in the outdoor illumined English poetry. We feel this
presence in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton etc and followed by Pope,
Thomas, Grey and Burns.
|
Another Lake poet, Robert Southery, a contemporary of Wordsworth |
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, inspirable friend to William Wordsworth
and was inspired by his sister, Dorothy. |
But it was Wordsworth who made deep and abiding impact on nature,
Love for nature was not incidental but a decorative part of verse. It
was an impulse on all poets of the day. By their worth in their own day,
they were called the Lake poets with Wordworth, Colerudge and Southey
leading the way.
They were friends for years and lived close to each other in The
English Lake district. But it was only in their youth that they were
close to each other. Coleridge drifted away from the Lake Country when
he was barely thirty two years of age. Wordsworth and Southey were
deeply buried in their own literary pursuits though living in the
beautiful Lake land to the end of their days. They hardly met each
other.
William was one among the five siblings left behind by his father
when he died. He was only thirteen and was brought up by his grandmother
along with the other four. They would have been wealthy had the Earl of
Londsale paid them the money he owed their father. But it was never to
be. At college he was not the most outstanding at learning but brother
Christopher was ahead of him securing Master of Trinity.
William while being a student, wandered across France, Switzerland
and Northern Italy, studying languages and admiring the scenery that
were to feature in his poems. After graduating he went back to France.
He along with the other intellectuals such as Samuel Taylor,
Coleridge who was a young scholar at the Cambridge during this time and
young Robert Southey at Oxford, had their interest focused on the
Revolution.
He mentioned about this as he sat to sketch The Prelude as these
poets parted ways, each going his way, Wordsworth opted to remain at
Lake district, with his sister Dorothy who influenced his poetry to a
great length. They were inseperables until death. She played a very
stimulating role that eventually made him the great icon poet he is
today.
When we read Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner in 1798 in their joint book
of poetry, the most exquisite of all his stanzas and the prose jointly
in it, can we doubt who it was who called his attention to the poetry of
moonlight. No doubt, it was Dorothy Wordsworty in whose journal the moon
was languished.
‘The mooving Moon went up the sky
And nowhere did abide
Softly she was going up
And a star or two beside’
And Wordsworthy replied with prose using her observations and we know
whom he was pleasing. It was Coleridge no doubt. And as these two wrote
a simple book on literary revolution, they never forgot their companion,
Dorothy.
‘The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare.
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair’.
Wordsowrth and Coleridge agreed to write a volume of verse in which
Coleridge took over the supernatural subjects taken from common life
while Wordsworth wrote the simple everyday stories. The outcome of this
idea was the ancient Mariner, a poem which gave Coleridge a lasting
place in the world of poets and poets who were icons. Tintern Abbey was
the first poem announced to the world by Wordsworth.
The book Lyrical Ballads was published by Cattle, a bristol publisher
who patronised Coleridge and Southey because they received good money
for their manuscripts.
When Wordsworth sold all his manuscripts to Longman, Lyrical Ballads
was rated valueless and was returned to Wordsworth. But it is this book
that stands as a landmark in literary history.
But why?
It was because the book marked the final freedom of poetry from the
restraints of the eighteenth century. It claimed the right to regard
emotion as poetical and simplicity in language and not formal or
learned.
And Lyrical Ballads had small intrinsic value as literature apart
from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Tintern Abeey and one or two other
poems. No poet has lent himself so felly to simplicity as Wordsworth.
Tintern Abbey tells us how he revisited the place after five years and
realised the spell of its beauty.
‘The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passio; the tall rock
The mountain and the deep and gloomy wood
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
an apatite; a feeling and a love
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye. That time is past’
The Ancient Mariner
Lyrical Ballads
The Prelude
Earl of Lonsdale
Dorothy Wordsworth |
