William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (Cockermouth, 1770 - Grasmere, 1850) was one of the leading English Romantic poets. Together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint volume Lyrical Ballads in 1798. His name remains one of the most recognisable in English poetry. He served as Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

He was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, in north-west England, the second of five children. His sister Dorothy, born the following year, stayed close to him all his life and became a writer and diarist in her own right. Their father, a lawyer who worked for a powerful landowner, was often away from home. Their mother died in 1778 and their father in 1783, leaving the children in the care of relatives. Wordsworth later recalled periods of loneliness and anxiety from those years, and it took him a long time to recover. He studied at Cambridge and graduated in 1791 without honours.

In 1790 he went on a walking tour across Europe that took him through the Alps and into Italy. In late 1791 he went back to France, where he became enthusiastic about the republican cause. There he fell in love with Annette Vallon, and their daughter Caroline was born in 1792. Money troubles and the strained relations between Britain and France forced him home the following year, without them. The Terror shattered his revolutionary hopes, and the years that followed were a period of personal and emotional upheaval. His contact with Annette and Caroline remained limited to occasional visits and financial help.

In 1795 a legacy allowed him to devote himself fully to poetry, and that same year he met Coleridge. The two published Lyrical Ballads in 1798. In later editions, Wordsworth's preface became a key document of English Romanticism. In it he argued for a language close to the speech of ordinary people and described poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity. His poems focused on humble characters and everyday life, and drew their inspiration from the landscape of the Lake District in the north of England.

After a trip to Germany in 1798 and 1799, he settled with Dorothy at Grasmere in the Lakes. There he began the autobiographical poem that would later be titled The Prelude, which he kept revising for decades. In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, and Dorothy continued to live with them. His friendship with Coleridge declined around 1804, partly because of their differing views and Coleridge's growing dependence on opium. Wordsworth moved steadily towards more conservative positions, both politically and religiously, and described himself as a Tory after Napoleon was proclaimed emperor.

The Prelude was published posthumously in 1850, the year of his death, under the title his widow gave it. It is now regarded as his major work, a long account of how a poet came to be. His legacy lies in showing that personal experience and nature could be the substance of poetry, and in shaping how later poets approached plain language and the individual voice. Together with Coleridge and Southey, he came to be known as one of the Lake Poets.