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William Wordsworth. 1770–1850. Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library / Alamy Stock Photo. 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 ...
- I Travelled Among Unknown Men
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- Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3
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- Tintern Abbey
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- Ode: Intimations of Immortality
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- Most Sweet It Is
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- Character of The Happy Warrior
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- It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free
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- I Travelled Among Unknown Men
- Overview
- Early life and education
- The great decade: 1797–1808
- Coleridge and Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) produced some of the greatest English poems of the late 1700s and early 1800s. In contrast to the decorum of much 18th-century verse, he wanted to relate “situations from common life” in “language really used by men,” embodying “the spontaneous overflow of feelings…recollected in tranquility” (preface to Lyrical Ballads [1802]).
What was William Wordsworth’s childhood like?
William Wordsworth grew up in the Lake District of northern England. There he spent much of his boyhood playing outdoors and exploring the mountains and lake-strewn valleys—“foster'd alike by beauty and by fear,” as he would later testify in his autobiographical poem The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind.
What did William Wordsworth write?
Stirred simultaneously by walks in the English countryside and by his relationships with his sister Dorothy and English poet-critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth wrote most of his major works during the “great decade” of 1797–1808, including “Tintern Abbey,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “Resolution and Independence,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” and The Prelude.
William Wordsworth (born April 7, 1770, Cockermouth, Cumberland, England—died April 23, 1850, Rydal Mount, Westmorland) English poet whose Lyrical Ballads (1798), written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement.
Wordsworth was born in the Lake District of northern England, the second of five children of a modestly prosperous estate manager. He lost his mother when he was 7 and his father when he was 13, upon which the orphan boys were sent off by guardian uncles to a grammar school at Hawkshead, a village in the heart of the Lake District. At Hawkshead Wordsworth received an excellent education in classics, literature, and mathematics, but the chief advantage to him there was the chance to indulge in the boyhood pleasures of living and playing in the outdoors. The natural scenery of the English lakes could terrify as well as nurture, as Wordsworth would later testify in the line “I grew up fostered alike by beauty and by fear,” but its generally benign aspect gave the growing boy the confidence he articulated in one of his first important poems, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey…,” namely, “that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”
Wordsworth moved on in 1787 to St. John’s College, Cambridge. Repelled by the competitive pressures there, he elected to idle his way through the university, persuaded that he “was not for that hour, nor for that place.” The most important thing he did in his college years was to devote his summer vacation in 1790 to a long walking tour through revolutionary France. There he was caught up in the passionate enthusiasm that followed the fall of the Bastille, and became an ardent republican sympathizer. Upon taking his Cambridge degree—an undistinguished “pass”—he returned in 1791 to France, where he formed a passionate attachment to a Frenchwoman, Annette Vallon. But before their child was born in December 1792, Wordsworth had to return to England and was cut off there by the outbreak of war between England and France. He was not to see his daughter Caroline until she was nine.
The three or four years that followed his return to England were the darkest of Wordsworth’s life. Unprepared for any profession, rootless, virtually penniless, bitterly hostile to his own country’s opposition to the French, he lived in London in the company of radicals like William Godwin and learned to feel a profound sympathy for the abandoned mothers, beggars, children, vagrants, and victims of England’s wars who began to march through the sombre poems he began writing at this time. This dark period ended in 1795, when a friend’s legacy made possible Wordsworth’s reunion with his beloved sister Dorothy—the two were never again to live apart—and their move in 1797 to Alfoxden House, near Bristol.
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While living with Dorothy at Alfoxden House, Wordsworth became friends with a fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. They formed a partnership that would change both poets’ lives and alter the course of English poetry.
The partnership between Wordsworth and Coleridge, rooted in one marvelous year (1797–98) in which they “together wantoned in wild Poesy,” had two consequences for Wordsworth. First it turned him away from the long poems on which he had laboured since his Cambridge days. These included poems of social protest like Salisbury Plain, loco-descriptive poems such as An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches (published in 1793), and The Borderers, a blank-verse tragedy exploring the psychology of guilt (and not published until 1842). Stimulated by Coleridge and under the healing influences of nature and his sister, Wordsworth began in 1797–98 to compose the short lyrical and dramatic poems for which he is best remembered by many readers. Some of these were affectionate tributes to Dorothy, some were tributes to daffodils, birds, and other elements of “Nature’s holy plan,” and some were portraits of simple rural people intended to illustrate basic truths of human nature.
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Many of these short poems were written to a daringly original program formulated jointly by Wordsworth and Coleridge, and aimed at breaking the decorum of Neoclassical verse. These poems appeared in 1798 in a slim, anonymously authored volume entitled Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge’s long poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and closed with Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” All but three of the intervening poems were Wordsworth’s, and, as he declared in a preface to a second edition two years later, their object was “to choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them…in a selection of language really used by men,…tracing in them…the primary laws of our nature.” Most of the poems were dramatic in form, designed to reveal the character of the speaker. The manifesto and the accompanying poems thus set forth a new style, a new vocabulary, and new subjects for poetry, all of them foreshadowing 20th-century developments.
- Stephen Maxfield Parrish
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798). Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that ...
Wordsworth was a leading figure in the Romantic poetry movement that focused on life’s daily experience in his writing. He is known for his fascination with the natural world and explores the emotional response one might have from it. His philosophy surrounds the notion that nature can be a restorative and a great source of inspiration.
Also known as "Daffodils," this is a famous poem by William Wordsworth, a key figure in the Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The poem reflects Wordsworth's focus on nature, imagination, and the power of memory. It is commonly regarded as his best poem and one of the greatest poems of the period.
Expert Answers. In " London, 1802 ," Wordsworth invokes the spirit of Milton in his savage indictment of contemporary England. At that time, England was changing rapidly, too rapidly for a lot of ...
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Often known simply as ‘Daffodils’ or ‘The Daffodils’, William Wordsworth’s lyric poem that begins ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ is, in many ways, the quintessential English Romantic poem. Its theme is the relationship between the individual and the natural world, though those daffodils are obviously the most memorable image from ...
