The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (18 page)

After graduation and another brief trip to France, Wordsworth found himself unprepared for any profession, rootless, virtually penniless, and bitterly hostile to his own country's opposition to the French. He lived in London in the company of radicals like William Godwin and learned to feel a profound sympathy for the abandoned mothers, beggars, children, vagrants, and victims of England's wars who began to march through the sombre poems he began writing at this time. This dark period ended in 1795, when a friend's legacy made possible Wordsworth's reunion with his beloved sister Dorothy—the two were never again to live apart—and their move in 1797 to Alfoxden House, near Bristol. There Wordsworth became friends with a fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and they formed a partnership that would change both poets' lives and alter the course of English poetry.

Their partnership was rooted in one marvelous year (1797–98) in which they “together wantoned in wild Poesy.”
Stimulated by Coleridge and under the healing influences of nature and his sister, Wordsworth began to compose the short lyrical and dramatic poems for which he is best remembered. Some of these were affectionate tributes to Dorothy, some were tributes to daffodils, birds, and other elements of “Nature's holy plan,” and some were portraits of simple rural people intended to illustrate basic truths of human nature. Many of these short poems were written to a daringly original program formulated jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and aimed at breaking the decorum of Neoclassical verse. These poems appeared in 1798 in a slim, anonymously authored volume entitled
Lyrical Ballads
, which opened with Coleridge's long poem
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
and closed with Wordsworth's
Tintern Abbey
. All but three of the intervening poems were Wordsworth's. The manifesto and the accompanying poems thus set forth a new style, a new vocabulary, and new subjects for poetry, all of them fore-shadowing 20th-century developments.

About 1798 Wordsworth began writing the autobiographical poem that would absorb him intermittently for the next 40 years, and which was eventually published in 1850 under the title
The Prelude, or, Growth of a Poet's Mind
.
The Prelude
extends the quiet autobiographical mode of reminiscence that Wordsworth had begun in
Tintern Abbey
and traces the poet's life from his school days through his university life and his visits to France, up to 1799.

In the company of Dorothy, Wordsworth spent the winter of 1798–99 in Germany. Upon his return to England—where he took possession of Dove Cottage, at Grasmere, Westmorland, where he was to reside for eight of his most productive years—Wordsworth incorporated several new poems in the second edition of
Lyrical Ballads
(1800),
notably two tragic pastorals of country life,
The Brothers
and
Michael
. These poems, together with the brilliant lyrics that were assembled in Wordsworth's second verse collection,
Poems, in Two Volumes
(1807), help to make up what is now recognized as his great decade, stretching from his meeting with Coleridge in 1797 until 1808.

In his middle period Wordsworth invested a good deal of his creative energy in odes, the best known of which is
On the Power of Sound
. He also produced a large number of sonnets, most of them strung together in sequences.

In 1808 Wordsworth and his family moved from Dove Cottage to larger quarters in Grasmere, and five years later they settled at Rydal Mount, near Ambleside, where Wordsworth spent the remainder of his life. In 1813 he accepted the post of distributor of stamps for the county of Westmorland.

Through all these years Wordsworth was assailed by vicious and tireless critical attacks by contemptuous reviewers. But by the mid-1830s his reputation had been established with both critics and the reading public. Wordsworth succeeded his friend Robert Southey as Britain's poet laureate in 1843 and held that post until his own death in 1850. Wordsworth's last years were given over partly to “tinkering” his poems, as the family called his compulsive and persistent habit of revising his earlier poems through edition after edition.
The Prelude
, for instance, went through four distinct manuscript versions (1798–99, 1805–06, 1818–20, and 1832–39) and was published only after the poet's death in 1850. Most readers find the earliest versions of
The Prelude
and other heavily revised poems to be the best, but flashes of brilliance can appear in revisions added when the poet was in his seventies.

(b. Aug. 15, 1771, Edinburgh, Scot.—d. Sept. 21, 1832, Abbotsford, Roxburgh)

T
he Scottish novelist, poet, historian, and biographer Sir Walter Scott is often considered both the inventor and the greatest practitioner of the historical novel.

In 1786 Scott was apprenticed to his father as writer to the signet, a Scots equivalent of the English solicitor (attorney). His study and practice of law were somewhat desultory, for his immense youthful energy was diverted into social activities and miscellaneous readings in Italian, Spanish, French, German, and Latin. In the mid-1790s Scott became interested in German Romanticism, Gothic novels, and Scottish border ballads. His first published work,
The Chase, and William and Helen
(1796), was a translation of two ballads by the German Romantic balladeer G.A. Bürger. Scott's interest in border ballads finally bore fruit in his collection of them entitled
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
, 3 vol. (1802–03). His attempts to “restore” the orally corrupted versions back to their original compositions sometimes resulted in powerful poems that show a sophisticated Romantic flavour. The work made Scott's name known to a wide public, and he followed up his first success with a full-length narrative poem,
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
(1805), which ran into many editions. The poem's clear and vigorous storytelling, Scottish regionalist elements, honest pathos, and vivid evocations of landscape were repeated in further poetic romances, including
The Lady of the Lake
(1810), which was the most successful of these pieces.

Scott led a highly active literary and social life during these years, but his finances now took the first of several disastrous turns. He had become a partner in a printing (and later publishing) firm owned by James Ballantyne and
his irresponsible brother John. By 1813 this firm was hovering on the brink of financial disaster, and although Scott saved the company from bankruptcy, from that time onward everything he wrote was done partly in order to make money and pay off the lasting debts he had incurred. Another ruinous expenditure was the country house he was having built at Abbotsford, which he stocked with enormous quantities of antiquarian objects.

By 1813 Scott had begun to tire of narrative poetry. That year he rediscovered the unfinished manuscript of a novel he had started in 1805, and in the early summer of 1814 he wrote with extraordinary speed almost the whole of his novel, which he titled
Waverley
. A story of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, it reinterpreted and presented with living force the manners and loyalties of a vanished Scottish Highland society. The book was published anonymously, as were all of the many novels he wrote down to 1827.

In
Waverley
and succeeding novels Scott's particular literary gifts—as a born storyteller and a master of dialogue who possessed a flair for picturesque incidents and a rich, ornate, seemingly effortless literary style—could be utilized to their fullest extent. These immensely popular novels, now known as the
Waverley
novels, include
Guy Mannering
(1815) and
The Antiquary
(1816), which with
Waverley
completed a sort of trilogy covering the period from the 1740s to just after 1800. The first of four series of novels published under the title
Tales of My Landlord
was composed of
The Black Dwarf
and the masterpiece
Old Mortality
(1816). These were followed by the masterpieces
Rob Roy
(1817) and
The Heart of Midlothian
(1818), and then by
The Bride of Lammermoor
and
A Legend of Montrose
(both 1819). He then turned to themes from English history and elsewhere and wrote
Ivanhoe
(1819), a novel set in 12th-century England and one that remains his most popular book. Two more masterpieces were
Kenilworth
(1821), set
in Elizabethan England, and the highly successful
Quentin Durward
(1823), set in 15th-century France. The best of his later novels are
Redgauntlet
(1824) and
The Talisman
(1825), the latter being set in Palestine during the Crusades.

Scott's immense earnings in those years contributed to his financial downfall. Eager to own an estate and to act the part of a bountiful laird, he anticipated his income and involved himself in exceedingly complicated and ultimately disastrous financial agreements with his publisher, Archibald Constable, and his agents, the Ballantynes. When Constable was unable to meet his liabilities and went bankrupt, he dragged down the Ballantynes and Scott in his wake because their financial interests were inextricably intermingled. Scott assumed personal responsibility for both his and the Ballantynes' liabilities and thus dedicated himself for the rest of his life to paying off debts amounting to about £120,000.

The result was reckless haste in the production of all his later books and compulsive work whose strain shortened his life, though his rapidity and ease of writing remained largely unimpaired, as did his popularity. Scott's creditors were not hard with him during this period, however, and he was generally revered as the grand old man of English letters. In 1827 Scott's authorship of the
Waverley
novels was finally made public. In 1831 his health deteriorated sharply, and he tried a continental tour with a long stay at Naples to aid recovery. He was taken home and died in 1832.

(b. Oct. 21, 1772, Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, Eng.—d. July 25, 1834, Highgate, near London)

S
amuel Taylor Coleridge was an English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher. His
Lyrical Ballads
, written
with William Wordsworth, heralded the English Romantic movement, and his
Biographia Literaria
(1817) is the most significant work of general literary criticism produced in the English Romantic period.

In 1791 Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge. In his third year there, oppressed by financial difficulties, he went to London and enlisted as a dragoon under the assumed name of Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. Despite his unfitness for the life, he remained until discovered by his friends; he was then bought out by his brothers and restored to Cambridge. A chance meeting with the poet Robert Southey led to a close association between the two men and a plan, eventually aborted, to set up a utopian community in Pennsylvania.

Despite these difficulties, Coleridge's intellect flowered in an extraordinary manner during this period, as he embarked on an investigation of the nature of the human mind, joined by William Wordsworth, with whom he had become acquainted in 1795. Together they entered upon one of the most influential creative periods of English literature. Coleridge was developing a new, informal mode of poetry in which he could use a conversational tone and rhythm to give unity to a poem, best exemplified by
Frost at Midnight
.

That poem was an element of Coleridge's exploration of the possibility that all religions and mythical traditions, with their general agreement on the unity of God and the immortality of the soul, sprang from a universal life consciousness, which was expressed particularly through the phenomena of human genius. While these speculations were at their most intense, Coleridge, according to his own account, composed under the influence of laudanum the mysterious poetic fragment known as
Kubla Khan
. The exotic imagery and rhythmic chant of this poem have led many critics to conclude that it should be read as a
“meaningless reverie,” but it is, like
Frost at Midnight
, a complex poem about the nature of human genius.

Coleridge was enabled to explore similar themes in
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
, composed during the autumn and winter of 1797–98. For this, his most famous poem, he drew upon the ballad form. The main narrative, infused with supernatural elements, tells how a sailor who has committed a crime against the life principle by slaying an albatross suffers from torments, physical and mental, in which the nature of his crime is made known to him. The placing of it at the beginning of
Lyrical Ballads
(1798) was evidently intended by Coleridge and Wordsworth to provide a context for the sense of wonder in common life that marks many of Wordsworth's contributions.