Wordsworth, William 1770-1850
English poet

He was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, and was orphaned at an early age. He was sent to Hawkshead in the Lake District for board and education and this was one of the formative periods of his life, followed by St John's College, Cambridge (1787-91), where he was exposed to agnostic and revolutionary ideas. A walking tour through France and Switzerland in 1790 showed him France still optimistic from the Revolution, before disillusionment had set in. Two immature poems belong to this period - An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, both published in 1793. Leaving Cambridge without a profession, he stayed for a little over a year at Blois. There he had an affair with Annette Vallon, which produced an illegitimate daughter, Ann Caroline, and is reflected in Vaudracour and Julia (c.1804, published 1820). He returned to England when war with France was declared, but the depressing poem Guilt and Sorrow, from this period, shows that he was still passionate about social justice. For a time he fell under the spell of William Godwin's philosophic anarchism, but the unreadable Borderers shows that by 1795 he was turning his back both on the Revolution and on Godwinism. With the help of his sister Dorothy and Coleridge, who had renounced his revolutionary ardour somewhat earlier, he discovered his true vocation, that of the poet exploring the lives of common people living in contact with divine nature and untouched by the rebellious spirit of the times. The Wordsworths and Coleridge settled in Somerset (1797), and from this close association resulted Lyrical Ballads (1798), the first manifesto of the new poetry, which opened with Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner' and concluded with Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey'. This alliance ended when the Wordsworths moved to Grasmere after a visit to Germany with Coleridge, and Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson (1802). He was set on his proper task and, modestly provided for by a legacy of �900, he embarked upon a long spell of routine work and relative happiness broken only by family misfortunes - the death of his sailor brother John (1805), which may have inspired the 'Ode to Duty', and Dorothy's mental breakdown. Meanwhile Napoleon I's ambitions had completely destroyed the poet's revolutionary sympathies, as the patriotic sonnets sent to the Morning Post at about the time of the Peace of Amiens (1802-03) and after show. Apart from the sonnets, this was his most inspired period. The additions to the third edition of Lyrical Ballads (1801) contained the grave pastoral Michael, Ruth and four of the exquisite Lucy poems. The first of his tours in Scotland (1803), recorded perfectly by Dorothy, yielded some fine poems, including The Solitary Reaper. The great poem he was now contemplating - The Recluse - was never finished, but The Prelude, the record of the poet's mind, was read to Coleridge in 1805. It remained unpublished until after his death, when it appeared with all the tamperings of a lifetime but substantially in its 1805 form, which fortunately has survived. Two volumes of poems appeared in 1807, the product of five years of intense activity. The ode 'Intimations of Immortality' is only the loftiest of a number of masterpieces, including the patriotic sonnets, the 'Affliction of Margaret', the 'Memorials of a Tour in Scotland', the 'Ode to Duty', and many others. He had now reached the peak of his poetic form and the remainder of his work, including The Excursion (1814), the Ecclesiastical Sonnets and the Memorials of his various tours, do not reflect his genius. He succeeded Robert Southey as Poet Laureate in 1843.

Bibliography: M Moorman, The Life of William Wordsworth (1957-65)