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Portrait of William Wordsworth

Literature · Poets

William Wordsworth

1770–1850 · English

Romanticism; Lake Poets

William Wordsworth was the leading poet of English Romanticism, who with Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads (1798), a landmark in the use of ordinary language and rural subjects in poetry. Born in Cockermouth, he spent most of his life in the Lake District, where his poems of nature, memory and the growth of the mind made him the central figure of the "Lake Poets". He was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death.

How to spot them

  • ▸Lyrical Ballads (1798) with Coleridge; the 1800 Preface on 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'
  • ▸'I wandered lonely as a cloud' (daffodils) and 'Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey'
  • ▸The Prelude, autobiographical epic published posthumously in 1850
  • ▸Dove Cottage in Grasmere and Rydal Mount; sister Dorothy
  • ▸Poet Laureate 1843–1850, succeeding Robert Southey

Key works

Lyrical Ballads (1798)

Joint anonymous collection with Coleridge, opening with The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere

Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey (1798)

Blank-verse meditation on revisiting the Wye valley and nature's restorative power

The Prelude (1850 (written from 1798))

Autobiographical epic on the 'growth of a poet's mind', titled by his widow Mary

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (Daffodils) (1807)

Lyric inspired by daffodils seen with Dorothy beside Ullswater in 1802

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 (1807)

Sonnet on London at dawn: 'Earth has not anything to show more fair'

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1807)

Ode on the fading of childhood's visionary gleam

The Excursion (1814)

Long philosophical poem, intended as part of the unfinished project The Recluse

The Solitary Reaper (1807)

Lyric on a Highland girl singing alone as she reaps

Key ideas

  • Poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings', taking its origin from 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'
  • Rejection of artificial 'poetic diction' in favour of 'the real language of men'
  • Nature as moral teacher and source of spiritual renewal; 'spots of time' in memory
  • 'The Child is father of the Man' (My Heart Leaps Up)

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Cockermouth, Cumberland; educated at Hawkshead Grammar School and St John's College, Cambridge
  • •Lived at Dove Cottage, Grasmere (1799–1808) and later at Rydal Mount (from 1813)
  • •Wrote of the French Revolution: 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive'
  • •Had a daughter, Caroline, with Annette Vallon in France in 1792
  • •Appointed Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland in 1813
  • •Robert Browning's 'The Lost Leader' is widely read as an attack on his political conservatism
  • •Buried in St Oswald's churchyard, Grasmere

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources