Both his prose and verse writings register deep concerns about the proximity of the poet to other men. 1, p.980.Īlthough he eventually lost faith in revolutionary France, Wordsworth carried much of his radical beliefs over into his poetry of the late 1790s and early 1800s. Quoted in Robert Woof (ed.), William Wordsworth: The Critical Heritage (London New York: Routledge, 2001), vol. Wordsworth came close to participating directly in the pamphlet war that was then raging in Britain: he wrote, but did not publish, the vitriolic Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793), in which he defended the French Revolution in the wake of the Terror in the same year, he wrote Adventures on Salisbury Plain, a poem of social and political protest he planned in 1794 to launch The Philanthropist, a journal dedicated to serving the common good and to promoting democratic ideals. Subsequent years reflect his revolutionary sympathies, which were partly guided by his acquaintance with the philosopher William Godwin and his influential Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). When he returned to London in 1792, he associated with supporters of radicalism.

Sociability serves at once as a poetic resource, a concept in his prose writings, and a way of mapping his career.ĭuring the intellectual and political ferment of the 1790s, Wordsworth travelled to revolutionary France twice – in 17 – where he moved in revolutionary circles and came to embrace republicanism, which he later recorded in books VI and IX-X of The Prelude. Wordsworth’s contemporaries, whether sympathetic or hostile, tended to cast him as a solitary, but the representations of Wordsworth that they passed on to subsequent generations of readers overlook the place that sociability holds in his life and works. Even the more flattering portrait (pictured above) by Benjamin Haydon depicts him as a man absorbed in his own musings.

From the publication of Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) onwards, Francis Jeffrey, a prominent critic of the Edinburgh Review, relentlessly excoriated Wordsworth in his reviews over his singular style and choice of themes.

Other contemporaries were keen to emphasise Wordsworth’s idiosyncrasies. The poems for which he is best remembered, such as ‘Daffodils’ or The Prelude, tend to confirm this opinion. In coining the phrase, Keats initiated a tradition of regarding Wordsworth as a solitary, if not self-involved, poet. In a letter of 27 October 1818 to Richard Woodhouse, John Keats famously distanced himself from ‘the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime.’ 1

The recluse william wordsworth