Willian Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism (1988) VHS 60fps

William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism is made possible in part by Ameritech, parent of the Bell Companies of the Great Lakes region and other information related businesses. William Wordsworth was the central poet of the English romantic movement. His life spanned an 80-year period from 1770 to 1850, which saw the transformation of western society and the birth of the modern world. The exhibition William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism combines original manuscripts by Wordsworth and his contemporaries with great romantic paintings and watercolors to bring that period to life. Wordsworth's vision of nature, the individual and the power of the human imagination has shaped the way we think and feel today. As a young man, Wordsworth was inspired by the French Revolution of 1789 with its promise of universal freedom and a perfect society. He was the only English poet to visit revolutionary France and would later describe his feelings at the time in his famous lines, bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. Jonathan Wordsworth, university lecturer in romantic studies at Oxford University and chairman of the Wordsworth Trust. William Wordsworth, who was my great-great-grand-uncle, spent a year in revolutionary France in 1791-2 where he met Annette Vallon. They were very much in love and I think there's no doubt that they would have got married had they not been separated by the French war. He did, however, have a child by Annette and their correspondence that survives shows it to have been an extremely tender and passionate relationship. One very charming letter of Annette's actually marks with an X the spot where Caroline, their daughter, has kissed the paper. Another letter ends with the touching words, je t'aime pour la vie, I love you for life. The revolution soon descended into factional bloodshed and ultimately the rule of Napoleon. The reign of terror and the failure of revolutionary promise led Wordsworth first to despair and then to a reassertion of his faith in the natural power of the human mind. Gradually over the period from 1793 to 1797, Wordsworth himself turned from being a political activist to being a great poet. Wordsworth published the lyrical ballads in 1798. He was collaborating with his very close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge and together they produced a volume which changed the course of English literature. It was in fact radical in two ways. It was radical because the style was much more ordinary, much closer to the way that ordinary people speak, but further than that it was radical in a political sense. Wordsworth said that he was writing a poetry to show that those who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply, and that to us may not seem an important political statement but it was very important then. Wordsworth and Coleridge wished to write about subjects that mattered to everybody and that's really their link with the revolution. Not since the Elizabethan age had Britain seen such a burst of great poets. Writers who, though diverse in their genius, shared common central concerns. Michael Jay, professor of English at Rutgers University and director of the Wordsworth Exhibition. Wordsworth particularly admired the work of Robert Burns because it dealt with with realities. In his use of Scott dialect he was using what Wordsworth would later call the language of real men and he chose the common subjects of life. William Blake was quite another story. Prophet, visionary, some thought him a madman. He was both poet and artist and he had a unique vision of the world, a vision that was wholly that of the imagination. You can see it in this watercolor of the Circle of the Lustful, a drawing that is a radical reinterpretation of Dante's seventh circle of hell. Blake disagreed with Wordsworth vehemently because he felt that Wordsworth placed too much emphasis on nature, that is on physical reality. But for Blake, reality wasn't the surface world. It was the interior world, the world of imagination. He writes in a book of Wordsworth's poems, which was lent to him. It wasn't even his copy and he wrote in it. I see in Wordsworth the natural man rising up against the spiritual man continually and then he is no poet but a heathen philosopher at enmity against all true poetry or inspiration. For many people, Lord Byron seems a very epitome of the romantic poet. He made the very personal, private experiences a kind of public declaration in his poetry. One of his many lady friends described him as mad, bad and dangerous to know. But although an aristocrat, Byron was a revolutionary. He died during the Greek struggle for independence in 1824. Like many romantic poets, he died young, age 36. Percy Bush Shelley was also a radical revolutionary, perhaps more intellectual, more philosophical in his revolutionary faith. Wordsworth, who didn't admire Shelley's politics, thought that he was the best poet of us all. He too died young, drowning in a shipwreck, age 29. The manuscript here, among the last lines he wrote in The Triumph of Life, he says, and what is life, I cried. And he dies before he has a chance to answer the question. And when they fished his body out, they found in his pockets two books, one a copy of Sophocles and the other a copy of the poems of John Keats. For many of us, certainly for myself, John Keats is the most sympathetic of all the great romantic poets. His poetry, as in his sonnet on first looking into Chapman's Homer, is a poetry of personal, interior, imaginative voyaging. He does it through books. The romantic artist doesn't have to go out into the world. The world is the world within him. He died age 26, and he becomes a kind of archetype for the romantic artists who die young or who go mad. William Wordsworth had a premonition of this kind of tragic flaw, as it were, that led genius to destruction. He says in We poets begin our youth in gladness, but thereof come in the end despondency and madness. A romantic period was also an age of great visual artists. John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, John Sell Cotman, Thomas Girton, and others. Their work compliments and illuminates the writings of the poets, often drawing on shared ideas and emotions. Constable, for example, was fascinated by rainbows, the subject of one of Wordsworth's shortest and most touching poems. My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky. So was it when my life began, so is it now I am a man. So be it when I shall grow old or let me die. The child is father of the man, and I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety. When Wordsworth tells us that the child is father to the man, we don't perhaps find it very surprising, but it was very surprising at the time. He was 100 years ahead of his time in thinking of adult consciousness as having its foundations in childhood. And the rainbow, of course, beautifully picks up for us this sense of a continuing wonderment, the wonderment of the child continued into adulthood. Constable, too, was fascinated by rainbows, and they occur in the backgrounds of many of his most beautiful pictures. And like Wordsworth, Constable was always taking his art back into its origins, back into the period of childhood. It's fascinating how alike these two great artists are. Wordsworth with his bleak northern landscape of the Lake District, Constable with a lush, very fertile lowland agricultural land of the River Stour in the southeast of England. And yet, both of them having their imaginations fertilized and their art fertilized by this sense of the beauty and wonderment of childhood. Childhood is a central theme of Wordsworth's poem The Prelude. The origins of this epic work are preserved in a letter which the 28-year-old poet wrote to Coleridge while living in Goslar, Germany. Wordsworth's fullest treatment of childhood experience is his own childhood experience in his great autobiographical epic poem The Prelude. In the winter of 1798, the coldest winter of the century, he and his sister Dorothy went to Goslar, Germany. And there, cut off from his homeland, as it were, far distanced now in time and in space, he began to search the origins of his being to answer the question, how is it that he became a poet? This manuscript, called The Goslar Letter, is one of the great manuscripts in English literature. Wordsworth and Dorothy have crammed in the writing of that cold winter onto both sides of the page, horizontally, vertically, in a letter to Coleridge, a kind of report of what they've done. What he had done was to identify what he called spots of time, moments in the distant past of childhood which he was trying to recover to make the past an ever-living present. He speaks of his childhood as being brought up alike by both beauty and by fear, and many times it was fear, as in the stolen boat episode in which he goes out at night and he steals a boat and goes out on the lake and the cliff seems to rise up, he says, as if by voluntary power, instinct. From behind that rocky steep till then the bound of the horizon a huge cliff as if with voluntary power instinct upreared its head. I struck and struck again and growing still in stature the huge cliff rose up between me and the stars and still with measured motion like a living thing strode after me. With trembling hands I turned and through the silent water stole my way back to the cavern of the willow tree. There in her mooring place I left my bark and through the meadows homeward went with grave and serious thoughts. And after I had seen that spectacle for many days my brain worked with a dim and undetermined sense of unknown modes of being. In my thoughts there was a darkness, call it solitude or blank desertion, no familiar shapes of hourly objects, images of trees of sea or sky, no colors of green fields, but huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men moved slowly through my mind by day and were the trouble of my dreams. The Prelude wasn't published until after Wordsworth's death in 1850. In fact, he kept working on it, revising it through many, many different versions. The poem that Wordsworth's contemporaries really knew him by is called Tintern Abbey. Tintern Abbey was the archetypal picturesque ruin visited with guidebooks by thousands of tourists each year in search of the fashionable picturesque. Wordsworth's revolutionary poem of memory and imagination about his personal relationship to nature soars far beyond the picturesque. He says in Tintern Abbey that there are moments in which we see, notice how he says we because he includes us all, moments in which we see into the life of things. And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air and the blue sky and in the mind of man, a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought and rolls through all things. At the very time Wordsworth was discovering, in fact creating, a new intimacy of self and nature, of inner and outer, a privileged view of the natural world, English artists were doing the same thing in the medium of watercolor art, highly original, spontaneous, a privileged view of the natural world. And it wasn't only artists who were working in watercolor that were doing what Wordsworth says, seeing into the life of things. This is John Constable's Water Meadows at Salisbury, perhaps the most luminous painting in all of English art. And like the fate of all great original works of art, it was rejected. When John Constable submitted this painting to the Royal Academy in 1829, it was rejected out of hand as a nasty green thing. Dorothy Wordsworth, the poet's younger sister, was not only his very close companion throughout his life, but she was his inspiration. And I think we should add, a great writer in her own right. Her journal is now read by vast numbers of people who find in it an immediacy, a sympathy, a personal touch that is perhaps not to be found very frequently in her brother's writing. If I may just remind you of her description of the daffodils that are the source of his most famous poem. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and about them. Some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness, and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake. They looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. What Wordsworth did with this, of course, was to write a poem that, instead of being about an immediate personal response to nature, is really about the mind. We can think of it in rather the same terms, I think, as Constable's great cloud studies, in which we see the operations of the mind as we watch the clouds moving across his canvas. I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills, when all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils, beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine and twinkle on the Milky Way, they stretched in never-ending line along the margin of a bay. Ten thousand saw I at a glance, tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced, but they outdid the sparkling waves in glee. A poet could not but be gay in such a jocund company. I gazed and gazed, but little thought what wealth the show to me had brought. For oft, when on my couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude, and then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils. In December 1799, William and Dorothy settled at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, in the heart of their native Lake District, 300 miles northwest of London. He married Dorothy's childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson, in 1802, and all three spent the rest of their lives in the region. It seemed a kind of earthly paradise, a place where the beauty of nature fostered a sense of harmony between man and the natural world. The discovery of nature became part of an ideal, an ideal of human life lived simply in a rural landscape. Simple men living their lives in sympathy with the natural rhythms of the world. Wordsworth, when he went to Grasmere, thought he had found such an ideal society, an ideal society that could make up for the failure of the French Revolution. It was a world, he said, of perfect contentment, unity, and tire. Constable shares with Wordsworth this ideal of the deep-rootedness of human life in a landscape. Only Constable would paint, as a wedding present, two men digging at a dunghill, as in his Dead of Veil. And for both Constable and Wordsworth, the world, Wordsworth says, which is the world of all of us, the place where in the end we find our happiness, or not at all, was the security for a life that was constantly threatened by loss. This is John Constable's great masterpiece, Hadley Castle, Mourning After a Stormy Night. It was painted in 1829, soon after Constable's wife died. For this painting, Constable returned, returned not to a place but to the place of memory. He had first visited Hadley Castle in 1814, and now he goes back on the canvas to work out the difficulty of his loss. The greatness of the painting resides in the fact that it refuses to reconcile the difficulties, the problematics of human life. It is morning after a stormy night. The sun is beginning to break through the clouds. The world returns to its everyday life. The castle, the twin towers, have survived another storm, and yet they remain ruined castles. Wordsworth says nothing can bring back. If Constable shared with Wordsworth a sense of the sanctity of place, that is, a sense of human life lived in an eternal landscape, then J. M. W. Turner, the other great artist of the Romantic Age, shared with Wordsworth a sense of the overwhelming power, the energy of the natural world. Here in 1804, he painted two masterpieces. In one, the passage of St. Guthard, the stream falls, the mist rises, the landscape suggests the power inherent in nature. In the other, the great falls, the Reichenbach, the falls comes down, the trees, what remains of them, survive. But this is Turner in 1804. This is the power of nature. By 1845, Turner has moved away from pure representation to a power within the human mind that matches the power of nature. The vortex of energy seems to be the place where nature and the mind are fused. He does much the same thing in his great oil masterpiece, The Valley of Aosta. It is as much Turner's mind creating the world as it is the world impressing itself on Turner's mind. Most important, perhaps, for us is the end of Wordsworth's prelude. He calls himself and Coleridge prophets of nature. He says, what we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how, instruct them how. The mind of man becomes a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells. The imagination takes the everyday, the things we all live with, and transforms it, makes it magical. The romantic poets and artists are all different, all diverse in their genius, and yet they share one common impulse, and that's faith in the power of the transforming imagination. This is beautiful. That's just gorgeous. Wordsworth once said that he was going to talk about the very world which is the world of all of us, the place in which, in the end, we find our happiness or not at all. Often he seems to speak to us of very exalted states of mind, states of mind that we seldom, if ever, attain, and yet I think he writes very much with his feet on the ground, and I think his poetry speaks simply and strongly and very much from the heart, offering us a message which we can all understand, and which is about all of us as individuals.