Poets and Poems

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was a founding influence in the early nineteenth century Romantic poetry movement and a major figure in English literature.

William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770, the second of five children of John Wordsworth and his wife Ann Cookson. He was educated at a local school in Cockermouth, at the Dame Birkett infant school in Penrith*, at Hawkshead Grammar School and then from 1787 at St. John's College Cambridge, graduating with an ordinary BA Degree in 1791.

At Penrith and later at Hawkshead he would often go for long solitary walks in the beautiful countryside. In 1790, while still at Cambridge, he undertook a walking tour of Europe, visiting the Alps and surrounding countries. In 1791 he returned to revolutionary France and had an affair with a young French woman, Annette Villon, with whom he had a child**. With war pending, in 1793 he returned to England almost penniless, until in 1795 he received a legacy of £900 from a young Cambridge friend and admirer who had died of consumption.

Joined by his beloved sister Dorothy, he moved to a house in Dorset near the small village of Bettiscombe. By this time two collections of his poetry had been published (1793), 'An Evening Walk' and 'Descriptive Sketches'. The latter was greatly admired by fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an inveterate walker, who traversed fifty miles to visit Wordsworth. In 1797 Wordsworth rented Alfoxden House in the small village of Holford, just four miles from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey, in the scenic Quantock Hills area of Somerset.

The collaboration between the two poets was to prove probably the most important in all of English poetry. In 1798, initially anonymously, they co-published 'Lyrical Ballads' (later revised), thereby launching the Romantic Movement that sought in everyday language to embody a direct relationship between poet and subject. In 1799 William and Dorothy moved back to the Lake District, followed in 1802 by Coleridge and his family. Together with Robert Southey the trio were to become known as the 'Lake Poets'.

In 1802 a debt of £4000, owed to his late solicitor father, was finally discharged. Now financially secure, in October of that year he married his childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. They had five children, two of whom died in childhood. Their deaths were a bitter blow, as was that of his elder brother John, a sea-captain whose ship floundered in 1805. In 1813 William moved with Dorothy and his family to Rydal Mount near Ambleside, a substantial house in which he spent the rest of his life.

In 1805 Wordsworth completed the first version of what was to become known as The Prelude***, an autobiographical account of his early years that is now widely regarded as his greatest poem. He revised this throughout his life and it only appeared in print after his death. In 1807 he published 'Poems in Two Volumes' that contained many notably and now famous poems, including 'Ode to Immortality' and his best known 'I wandered lonely as a cloud', but the poems were poorly reviewed and only later received their due recognition. The decade from 1798 to 1808 was his most creative, and although he continued to write verse into his old age it is on this earlier work that his reputation rests.

In 1838 and 1842 he was honoured with doctorates in Civil Law from the universities first of Durham and then of Oxford. In 1843 he accepted an appointment as Poet Laureate, after being assured that nothing would be required of him!

William Wordsworth died from pleurisy on 23 April 1850, aged eighty, after catching cold on a country walk. He lies buried with his wife Mary at St Oswald's Church, Grasmere, near to the grave of his sister Dorothy who died five years later.

* For the sake of their schooling, in 1776 William and his sister Dorothy (his junior by one year) went with their mother to Penrith, thirty miles from their birthplace of Cockermouth (now in county Cumbria), to live with her parents. His future wife, Mary Hutchinson, was a pupil there. When his mother died in 1778, his father sent him to board in Hawkeshead in the Lake District. He sent Dorothy to stay with relatives in Yorkshire. They did not meet again for nine years.
** Whatever his initial intention towards Annette and his one year old daughter Caroline, with tension mounting between England and France he returned to England in 1793 and did not see the child again until she was nine. (A walk with her inspired the poem, 'It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.') Encouraged by his sister Dorothy, when Caroline married in 1816 he provided her with an annuity which was later converted into a cash settlement.
*** In the autumn of 1798, with Coleridge and Dorothy, Wordsworth travelled to Germany, where he started work on what was to become 'The Prelude' (originally intended as part of a planned longer poem, 'The Recluse'), and wrote  a number of other famous poems. Otherwise the visit was not a success and he and Dorothy returned to England the following autumn. In 1799 he and Coleridge spent three weeks walking together in the Lake District. While there Wordsworth learned that Dove Cottage in Grasmere was for sale and in 1799 he and Dorothy moved there. Dorothy was to remain with him as his lifelong companion, diarist and collaborator.

Lines from "The Prologue'

One evening (surely I was led by her*)
I went alone into a Shepherd's Boat,
A Skiff that to a Willow tree was tied
Within a rocky Cave, its usual home.
.
I dipp'd my oars into the silent Lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my Boat
Went heaving through the water, like a Swan;
When from behind (a) craggy Steep, till then
The bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Uprear'd its head. I struck, and struck again
And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still,
With measur'd motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling hands I turn'd,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the Cavern of the Willow tree.
There, in her mooring-place, I left my Bark,
And, through the meadows homeward went, with grave
And serious thoughts; and after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Work'd with a dim and undetermin'd sense
Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts
There was a darkness, call it solitude,
Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty Forms that do not live
Like living men mov'd slowly through the mind
By day and were the trouble of my dreams.
* nature