William Wordsworth
1770–1850
Biography
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was an English poet and one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement. He was born in Cockermouth, in Cumberland in the north of England, and lost both parents while still a boy. After his time at Cambridge he spent a period in France during the early years of the Revolution, and the experience shaped both his politics and his poetry.
In 1798 he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, a volume usually treated as the opening of English Romanticism. Wordsworth's preface, expanded in later editions, argued that poetry could be written in the plain speech of ordinary people and could take everyday life as its subject. His long autobiographical poem The Prelude was revised over many years and published by his widow after his death. He was named Poet Laureate in 1843 and died of pleurisy in 1850.
On this site, the book is Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, the volume through which many readers first meet him. It places his quiet studies of country people, children and landscape beside Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and in it the two poets test a new style: simple subjects, direct speech, and close attention to what the mind feels in nature.
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Books
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems
by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The 1798 volume that began English Romantic poetry puts Coleridge's Rime of the Ancyent Marinere beside Wordsworth's ballads of country life, among them We Are Seven, The Thorn and The Idiot Boy. It closes with the lines written above Tintern Abbey, and the spelling is that of…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.