William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, a market town on the northern edge of the English Lake District. He was the second of five children of John Wordsworth, a legal agent for the landowner Sir James Lowther, and Ann Cookson. The family home stood beside the River Derwent, and the poet later credited the sound of that river with shaping his earliest sense of the world ^[1].

Loss arrived early. His mother died in 1778, when William was eight, and the children were separated: his sister Dorothy Wordsworth, who would become his closest companion and collaborator, was sent to live with relatives, and the brothers were dispatched to Hawkshead Grammar School in the village of Hawkshead. Five years later, in 1783, John Wordsworth died as well, leaving the children dependent on uncles and entangled in a long dispute over money owed to their father by Lowther, a debt not settled until 1802 ^[2].

At Hawkshead the boy found compensations for his broken household. He boarded with a local family, roamed the fells, skated on frozen lakes, and read widely under a schoolmaster who encouraged verse composition. These years of half-supervised freedom in a working rural landscape supplied the memories, what he later called spots of time, that anchor much of his mature poetry ^[1]. In 1787 he went up to St John's College, Cambridge, where he proved an indifferent student, more interested in walking tours than in the mathematics honours course, and took his degree without distinction in 1791 ^[2].

Anyone asking who was William Wordsworth before he became the sage of the Lakes finds a very different figure: a young radical stirred by the French Revolution. During a summer vacation in 1790 he and a college friend, Robert Jones, walked across France and the Alps at the moment the country was celebrating the first anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, and Wordsworth was caught up in the general excitement ^[3].

He returned to France in late 1791 and stayed for roughly a year, mostly in Orléans and Blois. There he fell in love with Annette Vallon, a Frenchwoman four years his senior, who gave birth to their daughter Caroline in December 1792. Wordsworth had already gone back to England, short of money, and the outbreak of war between Britain and France in February 1793 made return impossible for nearly a decade. The separation, and his divided loyalties as his own country fought the revolution he had admired, left a lasting mark that he examined at length in The Prelude ^[3].

The mid 1790s were unsettled. He published two early poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, in 1793, drifted through London and the West Country, and flirted with the rationalist philosophy of William Godwin before recoiling from it. A legacy of 900 pounds from a young friend, Raisley Calvert, who died in 1795, gave him just enough independence to commit to poetry. That year he settled with Dorothy at Racedown in Dorset, and in 1797 the pair moved to Alfoxden in Somerset to be near a new acquaintance whose conversation had electrified him: Samuel Taylor Coleridge ^[2].

The friendship with Coleridge produced one of the most consequential partnerships in English literary history. In 1798 the two men anonymously published Lyrical Ballads, a slim volume that opened with Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and closed with Wordsworth's Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey. Most of the poems were Wordsworth's, and many took as their subjects beggars, shepherds, abandoned women, and children, figures conventional taste considered beneath serious verse ^[4].

For the second edition in 1800 Wordsworth added a preface that became a manifesto. Poetry, he argued, should employ a selection of language really used by men, and he defined it as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity. The preface attacked the ornate diction of eighteenth century verse and claimed dignity for rural and humble life as poetic material. Critics quarrelled with the theory, and some reviewers mocked the plainness of the poems, but the collection's influence spread steadily, and literary historians conventionally date English Romanticism from its appearance ^[4].

Before the second edition appeared, Wordsworth and Coleridge spent the winter of 1798 to 1799 in Germany. Homesick in Goslar during a severe winter, Wordsworth began drafting autobiographical passages about his childhood that grew, over the following years, into The Prelude. In December 1799 he and Dorothy moved into Dove Cottage in the village of Grasmere, returning for good to the Lake District landscape of his boyhood ^[1].

The decade after the move to Grasmere is often called Wordsworth's great period, and it supplies most of the William Wordsworth achievements that anthologies preserve. Poems, in Two Volumes, published in 1807, contained I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (popularly known as Daffodils), Resolution and Independence, The Solitary Reaper, the sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge, and Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. Contemporary reviews were largely hostile, with Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review a persistent antagonist, yet these poems gradually became fixtures of the English canon ^[2].

His largest project remained mostly private. The Prelude, a blank verse account of the growth of his own mind from infancy through the crisis of the revolutionary years, existed in a two part version by 1799 and a thirteen book version completed in 1805, which he read aloud to Coleridge. Wordsworth revised it for the rest of his life and withheld it from publication; it appeared in a fourteen book text in 1850, three months after his death, under a title chosen by his widow. Modern critics generally regard it as his masterpiece and one of the longest sustained autobiographical poems in the language ^[5].

He conceived The Prelude as merely the portico to a vast philosophical poem, The Recluse, which he never finished. The one major portion he did complete, The Excursion, appeared in 1814 in nine books. He also wrote hundreds of sonnets, reviving a form that had fallen from fashion, and published a prose Guide to the Lakes in 1810 that went through several editions and helped establish the Lake District as a destination, long before the region's association with him contributed to its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017 ^[6].

In October 1802, shortly after the Peace of Amiens allowed him to visit Annette Vallon and meet his daughter Caroline in Calais and settle matters honourably, Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend from Penrith. The marriage was steady and affectionate, documented in letters that surfaced in the twentieth century and revealed a warmth some biographers had not expected. The couple had five children: John, Dora, Thomas, Catherine, and William ^[2].

Grief kept returning. His brother John, a ship's captain, drowned in the wreck of the Earl of Abergavenny in 1805, a blow that darkened the poetry that followed. Two of his children, Catherine and Thomas, died within months of each other in 1812. Dorothy, who had kept the journals at Grasmere that fed images directly into his poems, suffered a physical and mental collapse in 1829 and lived on as an invalid in his household for a quarter of a century ^[1].

The household itself moved as it grew, from Dove Cottage to Allan Bank in 1808, then to the Grasmere rectory, and finally in 1813 to Rydal Mount between Grasmere and Ambleside, where Wordsworth lived for his remaining thirty seven years. That same year he accepted the post of Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, a government revenue position that ended his money worries and, in the eyes of younger radicals such as Shelley and Browning, symbolized his drift from youthful republicanism to settled conservatism ^[2]. His friendship with Coleridge, strained by Coleridge's opium addiction and by reported remarks Wordsworth made about him, broke down in 1810 and was only partly patched up afterwards ^[3].

Recognition arrived as inspiration receded. Most critics agree that little of Wordsworth's verse after about 1815 matches the earlier work, though he continued to write and to revise obsessively, publishing collections including The River Duddon sonnets in 1820, Ecclesiastical Sketches in 1822, and Yarrow Revisited in 1835. His politics hardened into Tory Anglicanism, and he opposed the Reform Bill of 1832, positions that dismayed admirers of the poet of 1798 ^[2].

Honours accumulated anyway. Durham University awarded him an honorary degree in 1838, Oxford followed in 1839, and in 1842 the government granted him a civil list pension of 300 pounds a year. When Robert Southey died in 1843, the seventy three year old Wordsworth was appointed Poet Laureate, accepting only after being assured that nothing would be required of him; he remains the only laureate to have written no official verses in the post ^[6].

The last decade brought a final devastating loss when his daughter Dora died of tuberculosis in 1847, a grief from which he never fully recovered and after which he effectively stopped composing. William Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount on April 23, 1850, a few weeks after catching a cold, and was buried in the churchyard of St Oswald's, Grasmere, beside family members, where his grave remains a site of literary pilgrimage ^[1]. Mary published The Prelude that summer ^[5].

Any William Wordsworth biography ends with an influence that outgrew the man. His insistence that ordinary experience, childhood memory, and the natural world were fit subjects for serious poetry redirected English verse, and poets as different as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Hardy, and Seamus Heaney worked in his shadow. Arnold, who edited an influential selection of the poems in 1879, ranked him behind only Shakespeare and Milton among English poets ^[7].

The Prelude gave later writers a model for the long poem of inner life, and its account of the growth of a mind has drawn sustained attention from critics and psychologists alike. His nature writing, along with the Guide to the Lakes, fed directly into arguments for landscape preservation; Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, a founder of the National Trust in 1895, was a devoted Wordsworthian, and the poet's complaint against the extension of the Kendal and Windermere Railway in 1844 is often cited in histories of the conservation movement ^[6].

His houses became institutions. Dove Cottage opened to the public in 1891 and is now the centre of a museum complex in Grasmere run by the Wordsworth Trust, which holds the largest collection of his manuscripts, while Rydal Mount remains open under the care of his descendants ^[8]. Among the most durable William Wordsworth facts is the simplest: lines he wrote about daffodils beside Ullswater in 1802, reworked from an entry in Dorothy's journal, are still among the most widely known verses in English, recited by schoolchildren two centuries after their composition ^[4].