Everything about William Wordsworth totally explained
William Wordsworth (
April 7,
1770 –
April 23,
1850) was a major
English romantic poet who, with
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the
Romantic Age in
English literature with their 1798 joint publication,
Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be
The Prelude, an autobiographical
poem of his early years which the poet revised and expanded a number of times. The work was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was England's
Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
Biography
Early life and education
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born
April 7,
1770 in
Cockermouth in
Cumberland—part of the scenic region in north-west England called the
Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist
Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year. After the death of their mother in 1778, their father sent William to
Hawkshead Grammar School and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She and William didn't meet again for another nine years. His father died when he was 13.
Wordsworth began attending
St John's College, Cambridge in 1787, maintained by his maternal grandparents. 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 nearly 3000 mile walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the
Alps extensively, and also visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy. It is also said that he visited China to learn the language of the Samurai, but sources are inconclusive. The following year, he graduated from Cambridge without distinction. His youngest brother,
Christopher, rose to be Master of
Trinity College.
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. During this period, he wrote his acclaimed "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," recalling his seaside walk with his daughter, whom he hadn't seen for ten years. At the conception of this poem, he'd never seen his daughter before. The occurring lines reveal his deep love for both child and mother. 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 also 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 France and arrived at a mutually agreeable settlement regarding Wordsworth's obligations. 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 "". 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.
"She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways"- "Prospectus to The Recluse"
Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822)
The Prelude (1850, posthumous)
Further Information
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