赏析William Wordsworth.doc

William Wordsworth Wordsworth was born in the Lake District of northern England. The natural scenery of the English lakes could terrify as well as nurture. He moved on in 1787 to St. Johns College, Cambridge. Repelled by the competitive pressures there, he elected to idle his way through the university, persuaded that he was not for that hour, nor for that place. The most important thing he did in his college years was to devote his summer vacation in 1790 to a long walking tour through revolutionary France. The three or four years that followed his return to England were the darkest of Wordsworths life. Unprepared for any profession, rootless, virtually penniless, bitterly hostile to his own countrys opposition to the French, he knocked about 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 Englands wars. Through all these years Wordsworth was assailed by vicious and tireless critical attacks by contemptuous reviewers; no great poet has ever had to endure worse. But finally, with the publication of The River Dutton in 1820, the tide began to turn, and by the mid-1830s his reputation had been established with both critics and the reading public. Wordsworths 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 and was published only after the poets 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. Wordsworth succeeded his friend Robert Southey as Britains poet laureate in 1843 and held that post until his own death in 1850.Thereafterhis influence was felt throughout the rest of the 19th century, thou