18 pages • 36 minutes read
William WordsworthA Complaint
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1807A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
The historical context of “A Complaint” is biographical. Any anthologized printing of “A Complaint” involves a footnote explaining that Wordsworth first composed the poem about his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge after Coleridge’s departure in 1804 for Malta. Coleridge saw the sunny Mediterranean island as retreat therapy to help him overcome his addiction to opium (which it did not). The two friends would not meet again for more than three years. The poem, composed nearly a year after Coleridge departed, reflects Wordsworth’s distress over losing that friendship.
Much like other creative friendships between young writers that would lead to historic and often revolutionary reconceptions of literature—for instance, Hawthorne and Melville, Emerson and Thoreau, Eliot and Pound—the friendship between Coleridge and Wordsworth ultimately changed literature. They met in 1795 through mutual friends in London. Unlike the other later Romantics whose work Wordsworth would later influence, Coleridge was nearly the same age as Wordsworth. Their friendship shaped the poems that would appear in Wordsworth’s landmark Lyrical Ballads (1798). Because the poetry the two envisioned was radically out of step with the poetry of their own era, the two used each other as a sounding board to dispute their artistic vision, critique each other’s work, and ultimately to help each other through the difficulties of the creative process. That friendship, in turn, defined what would become Romanticism.
That historical context, however, should not limit the reach of the poem. After all, Wordsworth never mentions Coleridge, never even specifies the nature of the loss. The poem both is and is not about Coleridge. The departure of Coleridge is the occasion for the poem—but Wordsworth’s argument is more about the hammer-stroke intrusion of loss and how to handle the way that absence ironically becomes a kind of presence.
Literary Context
In ways that apply to a handful of writers in the Western Civilization canon, Wordsworth defined his own literary context, that is, he was more influential than influenced. Wordsworth, although he chafed against the authoritarian construct of education and was never entirely content in a classroom, was a voracious reader, something of an auto-didact. In addition to his involvement with the radical social and economic manifestos that stirred Europe as it struggled against centuries of monarchial rule and affirmed the dignity and worth of the so-called common man, Wordsworth meticulously studied the prosody of the iconic figures of England’s Neo-Classical age. These poets, most prominently Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, and supremely John Milton, found in the sculpted and stately lines of Antiquity, most notably the Greeks and Romans, a kind of approach to poetry that made central the wit and wisdom of the poet and, in turn, valorized the poet’s ability to shape that wisdom into rhythm and rhyme.
Thus, Wordsworth, an enthusiastic supporter of the idea of the French Revolution as well as a diligent student of Pope and Milton, embraced the growing affirmation of the individual and the importance of engaging the real-time real world (most notably nature itself rather than maintaining, as the Neo-Classicals inevitably did, a conversation with God). However, his poetry itself was anything but radical. He embraced the complex, often supple prosody that defined Neo-Classical verse. Wordsworth proposed that everyday people could engage the elevated language of poetry if that poetry investigated the world they knew. In that, Wordsworth became the architect of a literary context that would define more than a century of English-language poets.
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