WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most
central figures and important intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and
epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and
a fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in
poetry. The son of John and Ann Cookson Wordsworth, William Wordworth was born on
April 7, 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, located in the Lake District of England: an
area that would become closely associated with Wordsworth for over two centuries after
his death. He began writing poetry as a young boy in grammar school, and before
graduating from college he went on a walking tour of Europe, which deepened his love
for nature and his sympathy for the common man: both major themes in his poetry.
Wordsworth is best known for Lyrical Ballads, co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
and The Prelude, a Romantic epic poem chronicling the “growth of a poet’s mind.”
Wordsworth’s deep love for the “beauteous forms” of the natural world was established
early.

The intense lifelong friendship between William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy
probably began when they, along with Mary Hutchinson, attended school at Penrith. In
March of 1778 Ann Wordsworth died while visiting a friend in London. In June 1778
Dorothy was sent to live in Halifax, Yorkshire, with her mother’s cousin Elizabeth
Threlkeld, and she lived there ever since. She did not see William again until 1787.

Though separated from their sister, all the boys eventually attended school together at
Hawkshead, staying in the house of Ann Tyson. In 1787, despite poor finances caused by
ongoing litigation over Lord Lowther's debt to John Wordsworth's estate, Wordsworth
went up to Cambridge as a sizar in St. John’s College.

Though Wordsworth, encouraged by his headmaster William Taylor, had been

In December 1791, he met and fell in love with Annette Vallon, and at the beginning of
1792 he became the close friend of an intellectual and philosophical army officer, Michel
Beaupuy, with whom he discussed politics. While still in France, Wordsworth began
work on the first extended poetic efforts of his maturity, Descriptive Sketches, which was
published in 1793, after the appearance of a poem written at Cambridge, An Evening
Walk (1793). Having exhausted his money, he left France in early December 1792 before
Annette Vallon gave birth to his child Caroline.

His relationship with Annette Vallon had become known to his English relatives, and any
further opportunity of entering the Church was foreclosed. In any case Wordsworth had
been reading atheist William Godwin’s recently published Political Justice (1793), and
had come powerfully under its sway.

Wordsworth met another radical young man with literary aspirations, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. In September 1795 William and Dorothy Wordsworth settled at Racedown
Lodge in Dorset, where they would live for two years. Then Wordsworth for the first
time found his mature poetic voice, writing The Ruined Cottage, which would be
published in 1814 as part of The Excursion, itself conceived as one part of a
masterwork, The Recluse, which was to worry Wordsworth throughout his life, a poem
proposed to him by Coleridge and planned as a full statement of the two poets’ emerging
philosophy of life.

In 1797, to be closer to Coleridge, the Wordsworths moved to Alfoxden House, near the
village of Nether Stowey. Because of the odd habits of the household—especially their
walking over the countryside at all hours—the local population suspected that the
Wordsworths and their visitors were French spies, and a government agent was actually
dispatched to keep an eye on them. The years between 1797 and 1800 mark the period of
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s close collaboration, and also the beginning of
Wordsworth’s mature poetic career. Wordsworth wrote the poems that would go into the
1798 and 1800 editions of Lyrical Ballads.

In September 1798 the Wordsworths set off for Germany with Coleridge, returning
separately, after some disagreements, in May 1799. In Germany Wordsworth continued
to write poems, and when he returned to England he began to prepare a new edition
of Lyrical Ballads. The second edition—that of 1800—included an extended preface by
Wordsworth, explaining his reasons for choosing to write as he had and setting out a
personal poetics that has remained influential and controversial to the present day.

Wordsworth’s last major work in prose represents a return to his earliest interest in the
land and scenery of the English Lake District.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge died in 1834, and, though the men had grown apart,
Wordsworth continued to pay particular attention to Coleridge’s erratic first son, Hartley,
a minor poet and biographer who haunted the Lake District on “pot house wanderings,”
to use Wordsworth’s memorable phrase. Hartley, the child addressed in Coleridge’s
“Frost at Midnight” and Wordsworth’s “To H.C. Six Years Old,” as well as the basis for
the child represented in the Immortality Ode, was a feckless figure beloved by the local
farmers, and Wordsworth took a special interest in seeing to his welfare. Hartley died in
1849, only a few months before Wordsworth, who instructed that his friend’s son be
buried in the Wordsworth plot in Grasmere Churchyard..

In 1843 Wordsworth was named poet laureate of England, though by this time he had for
the most part quit composing verse. He revised and rearranged his poems, published
various editions, and entertained literary guests and friends. When he died in 1850, he
had for some years been venerated as a sage, his most ardent detractors glossing over the
radical origins of his poetics and politics.