William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (born April 7, 1770, Cockermouth, Cumberland, England—died April 23, 1850, Rydal Mount, Westmorland) was an English poet whose Lyrical Ballads (1798), written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement. The principles he outlines in the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) were revolutionary. By seeking to compose poetry that reflects “incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men,” Wordsworth (with Coleridge) essentially changed English-language literature.

Early life and education

Wordsworth was born in the Lake District of northern England, the second of five children of a modestly prosperous estate manager. His father, John Wordsworth, was also the personal lawyer of Sir James Lowther, earl of Lonsdale. His mother, Ann Cookson Wordsworth, was the daughter of a cloth merchant and a member of the noble Crackanthorpe family.

Wordsworth lost his mother when he was 7 and his father when he was 13, upon which he and his brothers (Richard, John, and Christopher) were sent off by guardian uncles to a grammar school at Hawkshead, a village in the heart of the Lake District. His sister, Dorothy, was sent to live with relatives in Halifax (West Yorkshire). 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 lines “I grew up / Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear.” But the Lake District’s 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.”

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yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!

Wordsworth moved on in 1787 to St. John’s College, Cambridge. Repelled by the competitive pressures there, he elected to idle his way through university, convinced 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 he 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, Caroline, 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 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 such as 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 somber poems he was 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, and their move in 1797 to Alfoxden House, near Bristol.

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A Study of Poetry

Influence of Dorothy Wordsworth

William and Dorothy Wordsworth were never again to live apart. Indeed, with the exception of Coleridge, no one had a greater influence on Wordsworth and his development as a poet than his sister. They were exceptionally close, and after their deaths some biographers speculated whether their relationship was incestuous. There is no evidence to support this notion, however, and most scholars agree that the intensity of the siblings’ bond stemmed from having been orphaned and separated as children and sharing a creative sensibility.

Dorothy was also a writer, although a very private one compared with her brother, who enjoyed public fame. She kept journals in which she recorded household events as well as her observations of the local landscapes that she and her brother frequently explored on long walks. Her prose conveys remarkably keen powers of description, and many of her observations were carried over into her brother’s poems. Notably, her description in a journal entry in April 1802 of daffodils at Ullswater in the Lake District was used by William for his poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” Another journal entry that describes a man who gathers leeches found its way into his poem “Resolution and Independence.”

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Some critics have debated whether the similarities between the language in Dorothy’s journals and William’s poems constitute plagiarism on his part. Most scholars, however, agree that brother and sister were equal collaborators in their writing. For more examples of Dorothy’s influence on William, see Dorothy Wordsworth.

The great decade: 1797–1808

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.