Poems of Life in General: An Autobiography
His war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his mentor Siegfried Sassoon , and stood in stark contrast both to the public perception of war at the time and to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke. When Wilfred was born, his parents lived in a comfortable house owned by his grandfather, Edward Shaw.
After Edward's death in January , and the house's sale in March, [1] the family lodged in the back streets of Birkenhead. There Thomas Owen temporarily worked in the town employed by a railway company. Thomas transferred to Shrewsbury in April where the family lived with Thomas' parents in Canon Street. Thomas Owen transferred back to Birkenhead, again in when he became stationmaster at Woodside station. Owen discovered his poetic vocation in about [6] during a holiday spent in Cheshire. He was raised as an Anglican of the evangelical type, and in his youth was a devout believer, in part due to his strong relationship with his mother, which lasted throughout his life.
His early influences included the Bible and the "big six" of romantic poetry , particularly John Keats. Owen's last two years of formal education saw him as a pupil-teacher at the Wyle Cop school in Shrewsbury. In return for free lodging, and some tuition for the entrance exam this has been questioned [ citation needed ] Owen worked as lay assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden near Reading , [8] living in the vicarage from September to February During this time he attended classes at University College, Reading now the University of Reading , in botany and later, at the urging of the head of the English Department, took free lessons in Old English.
His time spent at Dunsden parish led him to disillusionment with the Church, both in its ceremony and its failure to provide aid for those in need. From he worked as a private tutor teaching English and French at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux , France , and later with a family. There he met the older French poet Laurent Tailhade , with whom he later corresponded in French. For the next seven months, he trained at Hare Hall Camp in Essex.
He fell into a shell hole and suffered concussion; he was blown up by a trench mortar and spent several days unconscious on an embankment lying amongst the remains of one of his fellow officers. Soon afterward, Owen was diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia or shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. It was while recuperating at Craiglockhart that he met fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon , an encounter that was to transform Owen's life. Whilst at Craiglockhart he made friends in Edinburgh's artistic and literary circles, and did some teaching at the Tynecastle High School , in a poor area of the city.
In November he was discharged from Craiglockhart, judged fit for light regimental duties. His 25th birthday was spent quietly at Ripon Cathedral , which is dedicated to his namesake, St. Owen returned in July , to active service in France, although he might have stayed on home-duty indefinitely. His decision to return was probably the result of Sassoon's being sent back to England, after being shot in the head in an apparent " friendly fire " incident, and put on sick-leave for the remaining duration of the war.
Owen saw it as his duty to add his voice to that of Sassoon, that the horrific realities of the war might continue to be told. Sassoon was violently opposed to the idea of Owen returning to the trenches, threatening to "stab [him] in the leg" if he tried it. Aware of his attitude, Owen did not inform him of his action until he was once again in France. At the very end of August , Owen returned to the front line - perhaps imitating Sassoon's example.
On 1 October Owen led units of the Second Manchesters to storm a number of enemy strong points near the village of Joncourt. For his courage and leadership in the Joncourt action, he was awarded the Military Cross , an award he had always sought in order to justify himself as a war poet, but the award was not gazetted until 15 February On the company commander becoming a casualty, he assumed command and showed fine leadership and resisted a heavy counter-attack.
He personally manipulated a captured enemy machine gun from an isolated position and inflicted considerable losses on the enemy. Throughout he behaved most gallantly. Owen was killed in action on 4 November during the crossing of the Sambre—Oise Canal , exactly one week almost to the hour before the signing of the Armistice which ended the war, and was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant the day after his death.
His mother received the telegram informing her of his death on Armistice Day , as the church bells in Shrewsbury were ringing out in celebration. Owen is regarded by many as the greatest poet of the First World War, [20] known for his verse about the horrors of trench and gas warfare. He had been writing poetry for some years before the war, himself dating his poetic beginnings to a stay at Broxton by the Hill when he was ten years old.
His great friend, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, later had a profound effect on his poetic voice, and Owen's most famous poems "Dulce et Decorum est" and "Anthem for Doomed Youth" show direct results of Sassoon's influence. Manuscript copies of the poems survive, annotated in Sassoon's handwriting. Owen's poetry would eventually be more widely acclaimed than that of his mentor.
While his use of pararhyme with heavy reliance on assonance was innovative, he was not the only poet at the time to use these particular techniques. He was, however, one of the first to experiment with it extensively. Anthem for Doomed Youth What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells, Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, - The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes. The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.
His poetry itself underwent significant changes in As a part of his therapy at Craiglockhart, Owen's doctor, Arthur Brock, encouraged Owen to translate his experiences, specifically the experiences he relived in his dreams, into poetry. Sassoon, who was becoming influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis , aided him here, showing Owen through example what poetry could do.
Sassoon's use of satire influenced Owen, who tried his hand at writing "in Sassoon's style". Further, the content of Owen's verse was undeniably changed by his work with Sassoon. Sassoon's emphasis on realism and "writing from experience" was contrary to Owen's hitherto romantic-influenced style, as seen in his earlier sonnets. Owen was to take both Sassoon's gritty realism and his own romantic notions and create a poetic synthesis that was both potent and sympathetic, as summarised by his famous phrase "the pity of war".
'That's when poetry seems to work best, when it takes in your dreaming A brief biographical note tells the reader that he was "born in , and for bush wisdom with an instinctive distrust of metropolitan life in general. Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century. In the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates described Plath as “one of the most celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English.”. Intensely autobiographical, Plath’s.
In this way, Owen's poetry is quite distinctive, and he is, by many, considered a greater poet than Sassoon. Nonetheless, Sassoon contributed to Owen's popularity by his strong promotion of his poetry, both before and after Owen's death, and his editing was instrumental in the making of Owen as a poet. Owen's poems had the benefit of strong patronage, and it was a combination of Sassoon's influence, support from Edith Sitwell , and the preparation of a new and fuller edition of the poems in by Edmund Blunden that ensured his popularity, coupled with a revival of interest in his poetry in the s which plucked him out of a relatively exclusive readership into the public eye.
There were many other influences on Owen's poetry, including his mother. His letters to her provide an insight into Owen's life at the front, and the development of his philosophy regarding the war. Graphic details of the horror Owen witnessed were never spared. Owen's experiences with religion also heavily influenced his poetry, notably in poems such as "Anthem for Doomed Youth", in which the ceremony of a funeral is re-enacted not in a church, but on the battlefield itself, and " At a Calvary near the Ancre ", which comments on the Crucifixion of Christ.
Owen's experiences in war led him further to challenge his religious beliefs, claiming in his poem "Exposure" that "love of God seems dying". Only five of Owen's poems were published before his death, one in fragmentary form. However, most of them were published posthumously: Owen's full unexpurgated opus is in the academic two-volume work The Complete Poems and Fragments by Jon Stallworthy. Many of his poems have never been published in popular form. Harold Owen, Wilfred's sister-in-law, donated all of the manuscripts, photographs and letters which her late husband had owned to the University of Oxford 's English Faculty Library.
These can be accessed by any member of the public on application in advance to the English Faculty librarian. An important turning point in Owen scholarship occurred in when the New Statesman published a stinging polemic 'The Truth Untold' by Jonathan Cutbill, [23] the literary executor of Edward Carpenter , which attacked the academic suppression of Owen as a poet of homosexual experience. Owen held Siegfried Sassoon in an esteem not far from hero-worship, remarking to his mother that he was "not worthy to light [Sassoon's] pipe".
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey came to be known as the " Lake Poets ". In , Lowther's heir, William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale , paid the 4, pounds owed to Wordsworth's father through Lowther's failure to pay his aide.
Thomas Hardy and the Church. They read like modern hard science fiction , [59] and introduced the literary technique known as indirect exposition , which would later become one of Science Fiction writer Robert Heinlein 's hallmarks. Now that my ladder's gone I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Articles containing Latin-language text Webarchive template wayback links CS1 maint: William's sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth , to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. University Press of Kansas , Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Publisher:
On 4 October, following his visit with Dorothy to France to arrange matters with Annette, Wordsworth married his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson. The following year Mary gave birth to the first of five children, three of whom predeceased her and William:. Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call The Recluse. In —99 he started an autobiographical poem, which he referred to as the " poem to Coleridge " and which he planned would serve as an appendix to a larger work called The Recluse.
In he began expanding this autobiographical work, having decided to make it a prologue rather than an appendix. He completed this work, now generally referred to as the first version of The Prelude , in , but refused to publish such a personal work until he had completed the whole of The Recluse. The death of his brother John, also in , affected him strongly and may have influenced his decisions about these works. Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances as articulated in The Prelude and in such shorter works as " Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey " have been a source of critical debate.
It was long supposed that Wordsworth relied chiefly on Coleridge for philosophical guidance, but more recently scholars have suggested that Wordsworth's ideas may have been formed years before he and Coleridge became friends in the mids. In particular, while he was in revolutionary Paris in , the year-old Wordsworth made the acquaintance of the mysterious traveler John "Walking" Stewart — , [21] who was nearing the end of his thirty years of wandering, on foot, from Madras , India, through Persia and Arabia , across Africa and Europe, and up through the fledgling United States.
By the time of their association, Stewart had published an ambitious work of original materialist philosophy entitled The Apocalypse of Nature London, , to which many of Wordsworth's philosophical sentiments may well be indebted. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood ". Up to this point Wordsworth was known only for Lyrical Ballads , and he hoped that this new collection would cement his reputation. Its reception was lukewarm, however. In , Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction, [10] and in , his son Thomas died at the age of 6, six months after the death of 3-year-old Catherine.
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In , he and his family, including Dorothy, moved to Rydal Mount , Ambleside between Grasmere and Rydal Water , where he spent the rest of his life. In Wordsworth published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part work The Recluse , even though he had not completed the first part or the third part, and never did. He did, however, write a poetic Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he laid out the structure and intention of the whole work. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature:.
Some modern critics [23] suggest that there was a decline in his work beginning around the mids, perhaps because most of the concerns that characterised his early poems loss, death, endurance, separation and abandonment had been resolved in his writings and his life. Following the death of his friend the painter William Green in , Wordsworth also mended his relations with Coleridge.
Coleridge and Charles Lamb both died in , their loss being a difficult blow to Wordsworth. The following year saw the passing of James Hogg. Despite the death of many contemporaries, the popularity of his poetry ensured a steady stream of young friends and admirers to replace those he lost. Wordsworth's youthful political radicalism, unlike Coleridge's, never led him to rebel against his religious upbringing. He remarked in that he was willing to shed his blood for the established Church of England , reflected in the Ecclesiastical Sketches of This religious conservatism also colours The Excursion , a long poem that became extremely popular during the nineteenth century; it features three central characters, the Wanderer; the Solitary, who has experienced the hopes and miseries of the French Revolution ; and the Pastor, who dominates the last third of the poem.
Wordsworth remained a formidable presence in his later years. In , the Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie reflected on her long acquaintance with Wordsworth. In , Wordsworth received an honorary doctorate in Civil Law from the University of Durham and the following year he was awarded the same honorary degree by the University of Oxford, when John Keble praised him as the "poet of humanity", praise greatly appreciated by Wordsworth.
Thomas Hardy
He initially refused the honour, saying that he was too old, but accepted when the Prime Minister, Robert Peel , assured him that "you shall have nothing required of you". Wordsworth thus became the only poet laureate to write no official verses. The sudden death of his daughter Dora in at the age of only 42 was difficult for the aging poet to take and in his depression, he completely gave up writing new material.
William Wordsworth died at home at Rydal Mount from an aggravated case of pleurisy on 23 April , [30] and was buried at St Oswald's Church, Grasmere. His widow Mary published his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death. Though it failed to arouse much interest at that time, it has since come to be widely recognised as his masterpiece.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This is the latest accepted revision , reviewed on 5 December For other uses, see Wordsworth disambiguation. For the English composer, see William Wordsworth composer. Early life of William Wordsworth. This section needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. April Learn how and when to remove this template message. A Cambridge Alumni Database. William Wordsworth in Context. Biography" at The Victorian Web, accessed 7 January Retrieved 28 May Retrieved 13 February With a Few Other Poems 1 ed. Retrieved 13 November Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems. Lyrical Ballads with Pastoral and other Poems.
A Life , Oxford University Press , , pp. Further Letters of Joanna Baillie. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.