A lover of the meadows and the woods

Forever burdened with his daffodils, Wordsworth still remains one of the great shapers of the English-speaking mind and a true champion of Nature 250 years on, says Adam Nicolson

- Adam Nicolson

BY the middle of the 19th century, Wordsworth had become a fixed item in the museum of English culture. He became Poet Laureate in 1843 and would often be observed by curious neighbours as he went about his business, composing to himself in his garden at Rydal Mount, Cumbria: ‘He would set his heäd a bit forrad and put his hands behint his back. And then he would start bumming, and it was bum, bum, bum, bum, stop; then bum, bum, bum reet down till t’other end, and then he’d set down and git a bit o’paper out and write a bit; and then he git up, and bum, bum, bum, and goa on bumming for long enough right down and back agean.’

The greatest poet in English between Milton and Yeats has gone down in history half as a joke, half as a monument. Forever burdened with his daffodils, gloomy beyond belief, sublime perhaps and egotistical for sure, Wordsworth will forever be considered as the human equivalent of Helvellyn: craggy, distant, snow-capped, not quite one of us, perhaps a little touched.

However, there are many, many Wordsworths lurking inside this inaccessible mage and it is for these other qualities, beyond the crust, that we should love him. Seamus Heaney loved and admired him as much as he did Yeats. The critic John Carey, finding the modern in him, considered Wordsworth ‘the only poet who can point so unerringly to the aching gulfs in ourselves that lie beyond poetry, beyond expression, beyond help’.