
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".
And homeless near a thousand homes I stood,And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.
There's something in a flying horse,There's something in a huge balloon;But through the clouds I'll never floatUntil I have a little Boat,Shaped like the crescent-moon.
A primrose by a river's brimA yellow primrose was to him,And it was nothing more.
I traveled among unknown men,In lands beyond the sea;Nor, England! did I know till thenWhat love I bore to thee.
Much converse do I find in thee,Historian of my infancy!Float near me; do not yet depart!Dead times revive in thee:Thou bring'st, gay creature as thou art!A solemn image to my heart.
Behold, within the leafy shade,Those bright blue eggs together laid!On me the chance-discovered sightGleamed like a vision of delight.
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears;And humble cares,and delicate fears;A heart, the fountain of sweet tears;And love, and thought, and joy.
Sweet childish days, that were as longAs twenty days are now.
Like an army defeatedThe snow hath retreated,And now doth fare illOn the top of the bare hill;The Ploughboy is whooping— anon— anon!There's joy in the mountains:There's life in the fountains;Small clouds are sailing,Blue sky prevailing;The rain is over and gone.
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
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth Housein Cockermouth, Cumberland—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
. 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 siblings, had little involvement with their father, and they would be distant from him until his death in 1783.
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.
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.
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. 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.
Relationship with Annette Vallon
In November 1791, Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France and became enthralled with the Republican movement. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave birth to their child, Caroline. Because of lack of money and Britain
's tensions with France, he returned alone to England the next year. The circumstances of his return and his subsequent behaviour raise doubts as to his declared wish to marry Annette, but he supported her and his daughter as best he could in later life. The Reign of Terror
estranged him from the Republican movement, and war between France and Britain prevented him from seeing Annette and Caroline again for several years. There are strong suggestions that Wordsworth may have been depressed and emotionally unsettled in the mid-1790s.
With the Peace of Amiens again allowing travel to France, in 1802 Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, visited Annette and Caroline in Calais. The purpose of the visit was to pave the way for his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson, and a mutually agreeable settlement was reached regarding Wordsworth's obligations. Afterwards he wrote the poem "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," recalling his seaside walk with his daughter, whom he had not seen for ten years. At the conception of this poem, he had never seen his daughter before. The occurring lines reveal his deep love for both child and mother.
First publication and Lyrical Ballads

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.
The Borderers
From 1795 to 1797, he wrote his only play, The Borderers, a verse tragedy during the reign of King Henry III of England when Englishmen of the north country were in conflict with Scottish rovers. Wordsworth attempted to get the play staged in November 1797, but it was rejected by Thomas Harris, theatre manager of Covent Garden, who proclaimed it "impossible that the play should succeed in the representation". The rebuff was not received lightly by Wordsworth, and the play was not published until 1842, after substantial revision.
Germany and move to the Lake District
Wordsworth, Dorothy and Coleridge travelled to Germany in the autumn of 1798. While Coleridge was intellectually stimulated by the trip, its main effect on Wordsworth was to produce homesickness. 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
". Through this period, many of his poems revolve around themes of death, endurance, separation and grief.
Marriage and children
In 1802, after Wordsworth's return from his trip to France with Dorothy to visit Annette and Caroline, Lowther's heir, William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, paid the ₤4,000 debt owed to Wordsworth's father incurred through Lowther's failure to pay his aide. Later that year, on October 4, Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, two of whom predeceased William and Mary:
- John Wordsworth (18 June 1803–1875). Married four times:
- Isabella Curwen (d. 1848) had six children: Jane, Henry, William, John, Charles and Edward.
- Helen Ross (d. 1854). No children
- Mary Ann Dolan (d. after 1858) had one daughter Dora (b.1858).
- Mary Gamble. No children
- Dora WordsworthDora WordsworthDora Wordsworth was the only surviving daughter of William Wordsworth , major Romantic poet and British Poet Laureate. Her babyhood inspired Wordsworth to write the beautiful "Address To My Infant Daughter" in her honour...
(16 August 1804 – 9 July 1847). Married Edward QuillinanEdward QuillinanEdward Quillinan was an English poet who was a son-in-law and defender of William Wordsworth and a translator of Portuguese poetry.-Early life:...
in 1843. - Thomas Wordsworth (15 June 1806 – 1 December 1812).
- Catherine Wordsworth (6 September 1808 – 4 June 1812).
- William "Willy" Wordsworth (12 May 1810–1883). Married Fanny Graham and had four children: Mary Louisa, William, Reginald, Gordon.
- Dora Wordsworth
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 22-year-old Wordsworth made the acquaintance of the mysterious traveller John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822), 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. 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.
The Prospectus
In 1814 he published The Excursionas 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:
-
- My voice proclaims
- How exquisitely the individual Mind
- (And the progressive powers perhaps no less
- Of the whole species) to the external World
- Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,
- Theme this but little heard of among Men,
- The external World is fitted to the Mind.
Some modern critics recognise a decline in his works beginning around the mid-1810s. But this decline was perhaps more a change in his lifestyle and beliefs, since most of the issues that characterise his early poetry (loss, death, endurance, separation and abandonment) were resolved in his writings. But, by 1820, he enjoyed the success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works. Following the death of his friend the painter William Green
in 1823, Wordsworth mended relations with Coleridge. The two were fully reconciled by 1828, when they toured the Rhineland
together. Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 that rendered her an invalid for the remainder of her life. In 1835, Wordsworth gave Annette and Caroline the money they needed for support.
The Poet Laureate and other honours
Wordsworth received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from Durham University, and the same honour from Oxford University the next year. 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.
Death

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 recognised as his masterpiece.
Major works
- Lyrical BalladsLyrical BalladsLyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature...
, with a Few Other Poems (1798)- "Simon Lee"
- "We are SevenWe are Seven"We are Seven" is a poem written by William Wordsworth and published in his Lyrical Ballads. It describes a discussion between an adult poetic speaker and a "little cottage girl" about the number of brothers and sisters who dwell with her...
" - "Lines Written in Early Spring"
- "Expostulation and Reply"
- "The Tables TurnedThe Tables TurnedThe Tables Turned is a poem written by William Wordsworth in 1798 and published in his Lyrical Ballads....
" - "The Thorn"
- "Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern AbbeyTintern Abbey (poem)"Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, 13 July 1798" is a poem by William Wordsworth. Tintern Abbey is an abbey abandoned in 1536 and located in the southern Welsh county of Monmouthshire...
"
- Lyrical BalladsLyrical BalladsLyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature...
, with Other Poems (1800)- Preface to the Lyrical BalladsPreface to the Lyrical BalladsThe Preface to the Lyrical Ballads is an essay, composed by William Wordsworth for the second edition of the poetry collection Lyrical Ballads, and then greatly expanded in the third edition of 1802.-External links:**...
- "Strange fits of passion have I knownStrange fits of passion have I known"Strange fits of passion have I known" is a seven-stanza poem ballad by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Composed during a sojourn in Germany in 1798, the poem was first published in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads . The poem describes the poet's trip to his beloved Lucy's...
" - "She Dwelt among the Untrodden WaysShe Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways"She dwelt among the untrodden ways" is a three-stanza poem written by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth in 1798 when he was 28 years old. The verse was first printed in Lyrical Ballads, 1800, a volume of Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poems that marked a climacteric in the...
" - "Three years she grew"
- "A Slumber Did my Spirit SealA slumber did my spirit seal"A slumber did my spirit seal" is a poem written by William Wordsworth in 1798 and published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. It is usually included as one of his Lucy poems, although it is the only poem of the series not to mention her name....
" - "I travelled among unknown men"
- "Lucy GrayLucy GrayLucy Gray is the debut full length album from American emo band, Envy On The Coast. The album was released under Matt Galle's Photo Finish Records on August 7, 2007. The album's first single, "Sugar Skulls," is currently on the iTunes Music store. "Mirrors" has also been released as the second single...
" - "The Two April Mornings"
- "Nutting"
- "The Ruined Cottage"
- "Michael"
- "The Kitten At Play"
- Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
- Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
- "Resolution and IndependenceResolution and Independence"Resolution and Independence" is a lyric poem by the English romantic poet William Wordsworth, composed in 1802 and published in 1807 in Poems in Two Volumes...
" - "I Wandered Lonely as a CloudI Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is a poem by William Wordsworth.It was inspired by an April 15, 1802 event in which Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, came across a "long belt" of daffodils...
" Also known as "Daffodils" - "My Heart Leaps UpMy Heart Leaps UpMy Heart Leaps Up When I BeholdMy heart leaps up when I beholdA rainbow in the sky:So was it when my life began;So is it now I am a man;So be it when I shall grow old,Or let me die!The Child is father of the Man;And I could wish my days to be...
" - "Ode: Intimations of ImmortalityOde: Intimations of ImmortalityOde: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood is a poem by William Wordsworth, completed in 1804 and published in Poems, in Two Volumes . The poem was completed in two parts, with the first four stanzas written among a series of poems composed in 1802 about childhood...
" - "Ode to DutyOde to DutyOde to Duty is a poem written by William Wordsworth.-Description:“Ode to Duty” is an appeal to the principle of morality for guidance and support...
" - "The Solitary ReaperThe Solitary Reaper"The Solitary Reaper" is a ballad by English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and one of his best-known works in English literature.'"The Solitary Reaper" is one of Wordsworth's most famous post-Lyrical Ballads lyrics...
" - "Elegiac StanzasElegiac StanzasElegiac Stanzas is a poem by William Wordsworth, originally published in Poems, in Two Volumes . Its full title is "Elegiac Stanzas, Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont."...
" - "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" is a sonnet by William Wordsworth describing London and the River Thames, viewed from Westminster Bridge in the early morning. It was first published in the collection Poems in Two Volumes in 1807....
" - "London, 1802London, 1802"London, 1802" is a sonnet by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. In the poem Wordsworth castigates the English people as stagnant and selfish, and eulogizes seventeenth-century poet John Milton....
" - "The World Is Too Much with UsThe world is too much with us"The World Is Too Much with Us" is a sonnet by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. In it, Wordsworth criticizes the world of the First Industrial Revolution for being absorbed in materialism and distancing itself from nature. Composed circa 1802, the poem was first published in Poems, In...
"
- "Resolution and Independence
- Guide to the LakesGuide to the LakesGuide to the Lakes, William Wordsworth's travellers' guidebook to England's Lake District, has been studied by scholars both for its relationship to his Romantic poetry and as an early influence on 19th-century geography. Originally written because Wordsworth needed money, the first version was...
(1810)
- The ExcursionThe ExcursionThe Excursion: Being a portion of The Recluse, a poem is a long poem by Romantic poet William Wordsworth and was first published in 1814 . It was intended to be the second part of The Recluse, an unfinished larger work that was also meant to include The Prelude, Wordsworth's other long poem, which...
(1814)
- Laodamia (1815, 1845)
- The PreludeThe PreludeThe Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life without publishing it...
(1850)
Further reading
- Hunter Davies, William Wordsworth-A Biography, Frances Lincoln Ltd,London,2009 ISBN 978-0-7112-3045-3
- Emma Mason, The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth (Cambridge University Press, 2010) http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521721479
- M.R. Tewari, One Interior Life—A Study of the Nature of Wordsworth's Poetic Experience, (New Delhi: S. Chand & Company Ltd, 1983)
- Report to Wordsworth, Written by Boey Kim Cheng, as a direct reference to his poems Composed Upon Westminster Bridge and The World is too Much with us
External links
General information and biographical sketches- Biography and Works
- Romanticon: Wordsworth's Corpus Reflects the Growth of a Conservative's Mind; City Journal, Summer 2009
- Short biographical sketch by Glenn Everett
- Wordsworth's hidden arguments: an article in the TLS by Dan Jacobson, 31 October 2007
- Worsworth's links with Claines, Worcester
- Wordsworth and the Lake District
- Wordsworth's Grave
- Wordsworth and the Lake District
- The Wordsworth Trust
- Romantic Circles: Editions & articles on Wordsworth and other authors of the Romantic period
- Hawkshead Grammar School Museum
Books
- Anonymous; Wordsworth at Cambridge. A Record of the Commemoration Held at St John’s College, Cambridge in April 1950; Cambridge University Press, 1950 (reissued by Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-108-00289-9)
- Mallaby, GeorgeGeorge Mallaby (public servant)Sir Howard "George" Charles Mallaby, KCMG, OBE , was an English schoolmaster and public servant. He received the US Legion of Merit in 1946 and was knighted in 1958...
, Wordsworth: a Tribute (1950)
Wordsworth's works
- Works by William Wordsworth at Bartleby.comBartleby.comBartleby.com is an electronic text archive, headquartered in New York and named after Herman Melville's story "Bartleby the Scrivener". It was founded under the name "Project Bartleby" in January 1993 by Steven H. van Leeuwen as a personal, non-profit collection of classic literature on the website...
(HTML) - Works by William Wordsworth at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
(scanned books original editions color illustrated) (plain text and HTML) - Poems by William Wordsworth
- Selected Poems by W.Wordsworth
- Selected Works at Poetry Index
- Biography and Works
- Poetry Archive: 166 poems of William Wordsworth
- To Toussaint Louverture – poem by William Wordsworth
- Extensive Information on Wordsworth's Poem, Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
- Britain Unlimited's page on William Wordsworth