William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic

poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English
literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a

semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a number
of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known
as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his
death in 1850.

Early life

Main article: Early life of William Wordsworth

The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William
Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth,
Cumberland[1]—part of the scenic region in northwest England, the Lake District. His
sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was
born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other
siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went
to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was Master, Earl of Abergavenny was
wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the
Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.[2] Their father was a legal
representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived
in a large mansion in the small town. Wordsworth, as with his siblingss, had little
involvement with their father, and they would be distant with him until his death in 1783.
[3]

Wordsworth's father, although rarely present, did teach him poetry, including that of
Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser, in addition to allowing his son to rely on his own
father's library. Along with spending time reading in Cockermouth, Wordsworth would
also stay at his mother's parents house in Penrith, Cumberland. At Penrith, Wordsworth
was exposed to the moors. Wordsworth could not get along with his grandparents and his
uncle, and his hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating
suicide.[4]

After the death of their mother, in 1778, John Wordsworth sent William to Hawkshead
Grammar School in Lancashire and Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire; she and
William would not meet again for another nine years. Although Hawkshead was
Wordsworth's first serious experience with education, he had been taught to read by his
mother and had attended a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth. After the
Cockermouth school, he was sent to a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class
families and taught by Ann Birkett, a woman who insisted on instilling in her students
traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the
festivals around Easter, May Day, and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the
Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school that Wordsworth was to meet
the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who would be his future wife.[5]
Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The
European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College, Cambridge,
and received his B.A. degree in 1791.[6] He returned to Hawkshead for his first two
summer holidays, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous
for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790, he took a walking tour of Europe, during
which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland,
and Italy.

First publication and Lyrical Ballads

Wordsworth in 1798, about the time he began The Prelude.[8]

In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads", which is called the "manifesto" of English Romantic
criticism, Wordsworth calls his poems "experimental." The year 1793 saw Wordsworth's
first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He
received a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing
poetry. That year, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly
developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to
Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether
Stowey. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced
Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement. The
volume gave neither Wordsworth's nor Coleridge's name as author. One of Wordsworth's
most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only
Wordsworth listed as the author, and included a preface to the poems, which was
augmented significantly in the 1802 edition. This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is considered
a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as
the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which
avoids the poetic diction of much 18th-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth gives his
famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its
origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." A fourth and final edition of Lyrical
Ballads was published in 1805.

[edit] The Borderers

In 1795–96, revised in 1842, he wrote his only play, The Borderers (play), a verse
tragedy during the reign of King Henry III of England when Englishmen of the north
country were in conflict with Scottish rovers.

[edit] Germany and move to the Lake District

Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge traveled to Germany in the autumn of 1798. While
Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the trip, its main effect on Wordsworth was to
produce homesickness.[7] During the harsh winter of 1798–99, Wordsworth lived with
Dorothy in Goslar, and, despite extreme stress and loneliness, he began work on an
autobiographical piece later titled The Prelude. He wrote a number of famous poems,
including "The Lucy poems". He and his sister moved back to England, now to Dove
Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District, and this time with fellow poet Robert Southey
nearby. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey came to be known as the "Lake Poets".[9]
Through this period, many of his poems revolve around themes of death, endurance,
separation and grief.

Autobiographical work and Poems in Two Volumes

Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three
parts, which he intended to call The Recluse. He had in 1798–99 started an
autobiographical poem, which he never named but called the "poem to Coleridge", which
would serve as an appendix to The Recluse. In 1804, he began expanding this
autobiographical work, having decided to make it a prologue rather than an appendix to
the larger work he planned. By 1805, he had completed it, but refused to publish such a
personal work until he had completed the whole of The Recluse. The death of his brother,
John, in 1805 affected him strongly.

The source of Wordsworth's philosophical allegiances as articulated in The Prelude and

in such shorter works as "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey" has been
the source of much critical debate. While it had long been supposed that Wordsworth
relied chiefly on Coleridge for philosophical guidance, more recent scholarship has
suggested that Wordsworth's ideas may have been formed years before he and Coleridge
became friends in the mid 1790s. While in Revolutionary Paris in 1792, the twenty-two
year old Wordsworth made the acquaintance of the mysterious traveller John "Walking"
Stewart (1747–1822),[11] who was nearing the end of a thirty-years' peregrination from
Madras, India, through Persia and Arabia, across Africa and all of Europe, and up
through the fledgling United States. By the time of their association, Stewart had
published an ambitious work of original materialist philosophy entitled The Apocalypse
of Nature (London, 1791), to which many of Wordsworth's philosophical sentiments are
likely indebted.

In 1807, his Poems in Two Volumes were published, including "Ode: Intimations of
Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Up to this point Wordsworth was
known publicly only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this collection would cement his
reputation. Its reception was lukewarm, however. For a time (starting in 1810),
Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction.[7] Two of his
children, Thomas and Catherine, died in 1812. The following year, he received an
appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, and the £400 per year income
from the post made him financially secure. His family, including Dorothy, moved to
Rydal Mount, Ambleside (between Grasmere and Rydal Water) in 1813, where he spent
the rest of his life.[7]

[edit] The Prospectus

In 1814 he published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part The Recluse. He
had not completed the first and third parts, and never would. He did, however, write a
poetic Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he lays out the structure and intent of the
poem. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most famous lines on the relation
between the human mind and nature:
The Poet Laureate and other honors

Wordsworth received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from Durham
University, and the same honor from Oxford University the next year.[7] In 1842 the
government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300 a year. With the death in
1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became the Poet Laureate. He initially refused the
honour, saying he was too old, but accepted when Prime Minister Robert Peel assured
him "you shall have nothing required of you" (he became the only laureate to write no
official poetry). When his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry came to
a standstill.

[edit] Death

Gravestone of William Wordsworth, Grasmere, Cumbria

William Wordsworth died by re-aggravating a case of pleurisy on 23 April 1850, and was
buried at St. Oswald's church in Grasmere. His widow Mary published his lengthy
autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death.
Though this failed to arouse great interest in 1850, it has since come to be recognized as
his masterpiece.

Major works

• Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798)

o "Simon Lee"
o "We are Seven"
o "Lines Written in Early Spring"
o "Expostulation and Reply"
o "The Tables Turned"
o "The Thorn"
o "Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"
• Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800)
o Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
o "Strange fits of passion have I known"[13]
o "She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways"[13]
o "Three years she grew"[13]
o "A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal"[13]
o "I travelled among unknown men"[13]
o "Lucy Gray"
o "The Two April Mornings"
o "Nutting"
o "The Ruined Cottage"
o "Michael"
o "The Kitten At Play"
• Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
o "Resolution and Independence"
 o "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Also known as "Daffodils"
o "My Heart Leaps Up"
o "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
o "Ode to Duty"
o "The Solitary Reaper"
o "Elegiac Stanzas"
o "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"
o "London, 1802"
o "The World Is Too Much with Us"

• The Excursion (1814)

• The Prelude (1850)

•
o Guide to the Lakes (1810)
o Upon Westminster bridge