WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

English Romantic Poet

William Wordsworth (7th April 1770 – 23rd April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who helped to launch the Romantic age in English Literature. He alone with Samuel Taylor Coleridge launched Romanticism with their joined publication ‘Lyrical Ballads’ .

He was born to John Wordsworth and Cookson in Cumberland, England . He has a famous poetess sister Dorothy Wordsworth. He was taught by his mother initially and was later admitted to a school in Penarth . After his mother’s death he was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire . He later attended St. John’s College Cambridge . He first published his sonnet “The European Magazine” .

In 1795 he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge and they together published Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and started the Romantic Movement . His famous poem “Tintern Abbey” published alone with Coleridge’s ‘Rime of Ancient Mariner’. In the preface of this poem Wordsworth discussed what he sees as the elements of a new type of verse , one that is based on ordinary language ‘really used by men’. He gives the definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings , it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity ” and calls his poems as “experimental ” .

In 1798-99 he stared an autobiographical poem ‘Poem to Coleridge’ . In 1807 he published the poem “Ode Intimations of Immorality from recollection of early childhood” . In 1814 he published “The excursion , Daffodils , Ode to duty , the solitary Reaper , London 1802, The world is too much with us. He also published French Revolution 1810, Guide to the lakes 1810, Lavo Damia 1815, 45, the white doe Rylstone 1815 , Peter Bell 1819 , Ecclesiastical sonnets 1822 , The prelude 1815 .

He died at his home at Rydal Mount from an aggravated cause of pleurisy on 23 April 1850 and was buried at Oswald’s Church , Grasmere . His wife Mary published his autobiographical poem ”Poem to Coleridge as the Prelude” several months after his death . He remains as the famous and most influential poet the 20th century.