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William Wordsworth

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William Wordsworth (1770-1850), British poet, credited with ushering in the English Romantic Movement with the publication of Lyrical Ballads(1798) in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District. His father was John Wordsworth, Sir James Lowther's attorney. The magnificent landscape deeply affected Wordsworth's imagination and gave him a love of nature. He lost his mother when he was eight and five years later his father. The domestic problems separated Wordsworth from his beloved and neurotic sister Dorothy, who was a very important person in his life.

With the help of his two uncles, Wordsworth entered a local school and continued his studies at Cambridge University. Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787, when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine . In that same year he entered St. John's College, Cambridge, from where he took his B.A. in 1791.

During a summer vacation in 1790 Wordsworth went on a walking tour through revolutionary France and also traveled in Switzerland. On his second journey in France, Wordsworth had an affair with a French girl, Annette Vallon, a daughter of a barber-surgeon, by whom he had a illegitimate daughter Anne Caroline. The affair was basis of the poem "Vaudracour and Julia", but otherwise Wordsworth did his best to hide the affair from posterity.

In 1795 he met Coleridge. Wordsworth's financial situation became better in 1795 when he received a legacy and was able to settle at Racedown, Dorset, with his sister Dorothy.
Encouraged by Coleridge and stimulated by the close contact with nature, Wordsworth composed his first masterwork, Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." About 1798 he started to write a large and philosophical autobiographical poem, completed in 1805, and published posthumously in 1850 under the title The Prelude.

Wordsworth spent the winter of 1798-99 with his sister and Coleridge in Germany, where he wrote several poems, including the enigmatic 'Lucy' poems. After return he moved Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and in 1802 married Mary Hutchinson. They cared for Wordsworth's sister Dorothy for the last 20 years of her life.

Wordsworth's second verse collection, Poems, In Two Volumes, appeared in 1807. Wordsworth's central works were produced between 1797 and 1808. His poems written during middle and late years have not gained similar critical approval. Wordsworth's Grasmere period ended in 1813. He was appointed official distributor of stamps for Westmoreland. He moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside, where he spent the rest of his life. In later life Wordsworth abandoned his radical ideas and became a patriotic, conservative public man.

In 1843 he succeeded Robert Southey (1774-1843) as England's poet laureate. Wordsworth died on April 23, 1850.

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• Poetry Books

  • Lyrical Ballads 1798
  • Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Volume 1
  • Lyrical Ballads with Other Poems, 1800, Volume 2
  • Poems in Two Volumes, Volume 1
  • Poems in Two Volumes, Volume 2

• Poetry

  • A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
  • Admonition to a Traveller
  • Anecdote for Fathers
  • Animal Tranquility and Decay
  • By the Sea
  • Expostulation and Reply
  • Goody Blake and Harry Gill
  • I Travelled Among Unknown Men
  • I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
  • Influence of Natural Objects
  • Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey
  • Lines left upon a seat
  • Lines written at a small distance from my house
  • Lines written near Richmond
  • Lines written when sailing
  • London, 1802
  • Love
  • Lucy
  • Mutability
  • My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold
  • Ode
  • Ode to Duty
  • Ode: Intimations Of Immortality From Recollections Of Early Childhood
  • On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic
  • Ruth: Or The Influences of Nature
  • Scorn Not the Sonnet; Critic, You Have Frowned
  • She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
  • She Was a Phantom of Delight
  • Simon Lee, The Old Huntsman
  • Surprised By Joy
  • The Affliction of Margaret
  • The Ancient Mariner
  • The Complaint
  • The Dungeon
  • The Female Vagrant
  • The Foster Mother's Tale
  • The Fountain
  • The Green Linnet
  • The Idiot Boy
  • The Last of the Flock
  • The Leech-Gatherer
  • The Lesser Celandine
  • The Mad Mother
  • The Nightingale
  • The Reaper
  • The Reverie of Poor Susan
  • The Sun Has Long Been Set
  • The Tables Turned
  • The Thorn
  • The Two April Mornings
  • The World Is Too Much With Us; Late and Soon
  • Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland
  • Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower
  • To a Skylark
  • To the Cuckoo
  • To the Daisy
  • To Toussaint L'Ouverture
  • Upon Westminster Bridge
  • We Are Seven
  • When I Have Borne in Memory What Has Tamed
  • Within King's College Chapel, Cambridge
  • Written in Early Spring
  • Written in London, September, 1802
  • Yarrow Visited
  • Yew-Trees