Explore the poem

The former slave Toussaint L’Ouverture was a charismatic and hugely influential leader of the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804. This was a successful, anti-slavery and anti-colonial insurrection by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign nation of Haiti.
Toussaint L’Ouverture was imprisoned by the French and died in captivity shortly after Wordsworth wrote this poem which reads as an impassioned tribute to the revolutionary. The sonnet does not attempt to grapple with the complex politics surrounding the revolution but instead offers the imprisoned L’Ouverture the consoling thought that he has inspired others to stand courageously against slavery.
The opening phrase, “the most unhappy man of men” is taken from L’Ouverture’s own writings from prison where he laments his loss of liberty.
Notice how the poem does not associate Toussaint L’Ouverture with great military victories or political triumphs but presents him as a kind of force of nature who is taken up by the “common wind” the “air, earth, and skies”. A poem that begins with loneliness, dungeons and chains ends with “love” and the invincibility of the human mind.
Elsewhere in the Poetry By Heart anthology you can read John Agard’s “Toussaint L’Ouverture acknowledges Wordsworth’s sonnet “To Toussaint L’Ouverture”.

About William Wordsworth

Wordsworth’s early poems transformed the way in which poets came to express themselves. He published the influential Lyrical Ballads, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1798, rejecting the contrived, self-consciously poetic language that was fashionable at the time. He believed that poetry could use the real language of ordinary people in a state of ‘vivid sensation’. In celebrating nature and human emotions, he was an early leader of the English Romantic movement.
Wordsworth had been caught up in the French Revolution, had fathered an illegitimate daughter with a young Frenchwoman and returned to England with radical and democratic ideas (although his views became increasingly conservative in middle age).
His autobiographical poem The Prelude chronicles the spiritual growth and life of the poet, revealing the intense relationship Wordsworth had with nature as he was growing up in the Lake District. He continued to live there for the rest of his life, with his wife, Mary, and his devoted sister, Dorothy.