Shattering the shackles of artificiality and ornamentation present in the diction, rhythms, and style of Neo-classical poetry, Wordsworth advocated a “selection of language really used by men,” closer to the rhythms of everyday speech. In the Preface to the Lyrucal Ballads (1800), the seminal manifesto of English Romantic poetry, Wordsworth encapsulates the aesthetics of the new form of poetry that was to leave an unprecedented lasting impression on the genre. But Wordsworth was the first to officially and emphatically bring into the limelight, the need to reorient the poetic tradition, to redefine poetry, poetic diction, style and subject and the pressing need to bring each of these closer to the earth, to the commoners and rustics who inhabit it. Wordsworth was unarguably not the first poet of the poor, because predecessors like William Blake (his iconic “The Chimney Sweeper,” “The Little Black Boy”), John Clare (touted as “The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet”) or George Crabbe (often called the poet of poverty and misery) left piercing and moving pictures of the working classes, pastoral life, rustic simplicity.
The Graveyard tradition and the Pre-Romantic school first marked the shift in focus from the “higher” to the “lower” echelons of society, where poets like William Blake, Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, George Crabbe, John Clare, Robert Burns voiced the plight, the struggles of the commoners. The subject of the writers, the protagonists of the works in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were limited to either the aristocratic beau monde or the fast-rising middle classes. Be it Pope’s incisive attack on the pretentious and folly-ridden aristocratic life of Belinda the periodicals like the Tatler and The Spectator shuffling out tidbits of fashion, etiquettes, manners, and trends of its time to its middle-class and upper middle-class readership. Its aesthetic ideals and objectives arose as a reaction to the Neo-classical doctrines of reason, order, precision, restraint, artificiality, ornamentations, -characteristics which defined the literature and intellectual circles, as well as the life of the people of the era.
The Romantic tradition was the successor of the Neo-classical movement of the eighteenth-century.
Wordsworth was the self-professed spokesman of the reaper, the beggar, the leech-gatherer, and the woodcutter clan because he sincerely believed, and declared one of his aims, to show that men and women “who did not wear fine clothes could feel deeply.” The title “Bard” is primarily and conventionally considered a synonym for Shakespeare, but the term’s archaic meaning implies a poet who traditionally recites verses on heroes and heroic deeds Wordsworth recites in many of his poems, the deeds, lives, the hardship, the feelings of the rustics and common folk. Text adapted from Victoria & Albert: Art & Love, London, 2010.William Wordsworth, one of the pioneers of the Romantic school of poetry in English literature, after Shakespeare and Milton, can be seen as one of the Bards of English literature. The Queen was greatly pleased with her gift, and Wordsworth received a letter from the Lord Chamberlain conveying the Queen's thanks and admiration for the manuscript verses. The poet added a dedicatory poem in his own hand on the flyleaves. Wordsworth asked Edward Moxon, the publisher, to send a copy in sheets to the binder Westley, 'with the best impression of the Print and Title Page you can select'. On the publication of this new edition of his poetry in 1845, Wordsworth was requested to send a copy to Queen Victoria.
This fine presentation copy of Wordsworth's Poems is bound in green goatskin with an elaborate gilt pattern including a Royal crown on the boards. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were both admirers of Wordsworth and were very keen to have him as laureate. Initially he demurred, and was only persuaded to accept the position when it was made clear to him that there would be no writing requirements. Wordsworth was offered the poet laureateship late in his life, after the death of his friend and neighbour Robert Southey in 1843. He is best known for the early Romantic poems published in Lyrical Ballads, and his long, semi-autobiographical poem The Prelude. William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was a poet and leader of the Romantic movement along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.