二零一二英国文学第三讲补充材料 Wordsworth,Romanticism.doc

二零一二年英国文学第三讲补充材料 March, 2012 Part I Introduction on William Wordsworth WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 1770—1850 1791—92: In France during the early period of the Revolution. 1797: With his sister, Dorothy, Alfoxden House, Somersetshire, near Coleridge at Nether Stowey. 1798: Fist edition of Lyrical Ballads. 1799: William and Dorothy settle at Grasmere, in the Lake District. 1800: Second edition of Lyrical Ballads, in two volumes, with the famous Preface. 1807: Poems in Two Volumes; end of the great decade. William Wordsworth was born in Cokermouth in West Cumberland, just on the northern fringe of the English Lake District. When his mother died, the eight-year-old boy was sent to school at Hawkshead, near Esthwaite Lake, in the heart of that thinly settled region which he and Coleridge were to transform into the poetic center of England. William and his three brothers boarded in the cottage of Anne Tyson, who gave the boys simple comfort, ample affection, and freedom to roam the countryside at will. A vigorous, unruly, and sometimes moody boy, William spent his free days and occasionally “half the night” in the sports and rambles described in the first two books of the Prelude, “drinking in” (to use one of his favorite metaphors) the natural sights and sounds, and getting to know the cottagers, shepherds, and solitary wanderers who moved through his imagination into his later poem. He also found time to read voraciously in the books owned by his young headmaster, William Taylor, who encouraged him in his inclination for poetry. John Wordsworth, the poet’s father, died suddenly when William was thirteen, leaving to his five children mainly the substantial sum owned him by Lord Lonsdale, whom he had served as attorney and as steward of the huge Lonsdale estate. That harsh and litigious nobleman managed to keep from paying the debt until he died in 1802. Wordsworth was nevertheless able to go up to St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1787, where he found