"To Wordsworth" is an altered Shakespearean sonnet, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and addressed to William Wordsworth, mourning Wordsworth's turn to reactionary politics exemplified by his 1814 book The Excursion.
In 1814, William Wordsworth published The Excursion. Upon reading it, Mary Shelley noted in her diary, responding to the new work of a once-legendary figure who had a singular influence upon her husband as well as their fellow Romantics: “He’s a slave.” Percy Shelley took that private observation of his wife one step further by composing his own poetic, emotional reaction to what was viewed as Wordsworth’s betrayal of his former radical idealism by moving further toward conservative views in the wake of the horror of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.
The Excursion was Wordsworth's first major publication since his 1807 Poems, in Two Volumes, and it marked a major shift in his political thinking. Like his friends Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, Wordsworth had been a political radical in his youth, supporting the republican ideals of the French Revolution. However, Wordsworth's enthusiasm cooled as the French Revolution lapsed into the Terror, followed by Napoleon's tyrannical rule. As a result, he hardened into a reactionary conservative. The Excursion can be seen as Wordsworth working through this political shift in verse, rejecting the Enlightenment thought of figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau that was so important to the development of the radicalism represented by the French Revolution.
As a young poet, Shelley had deeply admired the work of Wordsworth. His politics and his poetic technique were influenced by Wordsworth's early work, such as his "Sonnets to Liberty," in which he expressed sentiments such as these: "We must be free or die, who speak the tongue / That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold / Which Milton held." As late as his famous 1819 protest poem "The Mask of Anarchy," Shelley alluded to Wordsworth. Wordsworth's political shift to conservatism in The Excursion was experienced by Percy Shelley—and by Mary, who shared his political radicalism—as a deeply personal betrayal. "To Wordsworth" is Shelley's poem, a sonnet, marking his disappointment and his sense of betrayal over Wordsworth's shift from the roots of liberty and equality.
Unlike Wordsworth, Shelley would preserve until his death a commitment to the ideals of liberty, republican government (as opposed to monarchy), and equality. His attack upon Wordsworth for betraying his former ideals initiated a period of revisionism toward the older man by the younger generation. Foremost among these responses was Robert Browning’s “The Lost Leader,” whose title makes clear both the earlier admiration and the present sense of betrayal felt by Wordsworth's poetic descendants.
The idealistic younger generation's sense of outrage at the older man’s move away from their own radicalism, it seems, went beyond mere criticism of his conservative political views. Intertwined with this objective critique is a deep subjective feeling of personal betrayal. The anti-Wordsworth reappraisal which Shelley's "To Wordsworth" inaugurated proved to be at least as strongly motivated by the universal feeling of disappointment one always when one discovers that one's heroes are not, in fact, infalliable. Shelley's poem thus stands as a complex testament, at once to the influence of Wordsworth, to Shelley's own politics, and to his sense of betrayal at the older poet's move away from political radicalism.
