William Wordsworth

• 1. Introduction

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  William Wordsworth was born on the 7th of April 1770 in what is now called Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, a market town sitting at the edge of the Lake District. He died on the 23rd of April 1850 at Rydal Mount, the same landscape he had spent most of his life walking through and writing about. Those eighty years bracket one of the most significant careers in English literary history, and yet his most celebrated work was only published after his death. His widow, Mary, gave the world The Prelude. The poem he had been revising for decades, the one he called "the poem to Coleridge", finally appeared in print in 1850, the year he died. Why did Wordsworth spend so many years refusing to release his masterpiece? What made this man, raised among hills and orphaned young, decide that ordinary speech was the proper material for serious poetry? And what happened to the radical who once crossed into Revolutionary France and fell in love with the republic, the daughter of a French Royalist, and the ideals of an entire generation? The story of Wordsworth moves from the rain-soaked fells of Cumberland to the drawing rooms of the Poet Laureate, from a secret daughter in Calais to a definition of poetry that still appears in anthologies today.

• 2. Lake District Childhood

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  John Wordsworth, William's father, worked as a legal representative for James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, and this position placed the family in a large mansion in the small town of Cockermouth despite John's frequent absences on business. That distance shaped his children. William and his siblings had little involvement with their father and remained emotionally distant from him until he died in 1783. What John did leave behind was a well-stocked library, and he set William to memorising large portions of verse from it: Milton, Shakespeare, and Spenser were among the poets the young boy was made to absorb.

  William's sister Dorothy, born the year after him, would become his closest companion for the rest of his life. She was a poet and diarist, and the two were baptised together. Their brother John, born after Dorothy, went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship he captained, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England. Christopher, the youngest, entered the Church and eventually rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

  After the death of their mother in 1778, William's father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire while Dorothy went to live with relatives in Yorkshire. The two did not see each other again for nine years. At a school in Penrith before Hawkshead, he had met Mary Hutchinson, whom he was taught alongside by Ann Birkett. Birkett instilled in her students a range of traditions, particularly the festivals around Easter, May Day, and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth also encountered difficult terrain closer to home: time spent at his maternal grandparents' house in Penrith left him so miserable in the company of those relatives that, as he later described it, the hostility drove him to contemplate suicide.

• 3. France and a Secret Daughter

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  In November 1791, Wordsworth crossed into Revolutionary France and was immediately drawn to the Republican movement. He fell in love with Annette Vallon, the daughter of a French Royalist, and in 1792 she gave birth to their daughter Caroline. Financial difficulties and the mounting tensions between Britain and France forced Wordsworth to return to England without them. The circumstances of his departure, and what followed, raised doubts about whether he had ever genuinely intended to marry Annette.

  The Reign of Terror extinguished his enthusiasm for the revolution. In December 1792 or January 1793, his family cut off the allowance he had been living on and recalled him to England. He did eventually support Annette and Caroline as best he could from a distance, but the separation defined what that relationship would and would not be.

  A decade passed before he saw his daughter. When the Peace of Amiens temporarily opened travel to France again in 1802, Wordsworth and Dorothy visited Annette and Caroline in Calais. The purpose, according to the source, was to prepare Annette for the fact of his forthcoming marriage to Mary Hutchinson. Wordsworth had never laid eyes on Caroline before this visit; she was nine years old. Afterwards he wrote the sonnet "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free", recalling a walk along the seaside with her. Mary Hutchinson, his bride-to-be, pressed him to do more for Caroline. Upon Caroline's marriage in 1816, Wordsworth settled £30 a year on her. Those payments continued until 1835, when a capital settlement replaced them.

• 4. A New Language for Poetry

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  Racedown House in Dorset, a property of the Pinney family, was where Wordsworth and Dorothy lived from 1795 for two years, walking the surrounding hills for roughly two hours each day. Dorothy wrote of the landscape: "We have hills which, seen from a distance, almost take the character of mountains, some cultivated nearly to their summits, others in their wild state covered with furze and broom. These delight me the most as they remind me of our native wilds." It was at Racedown that Wordsworth had also met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Somerset in 1795, and the two quickly developed an intense working friendship.

  By 1797, the Wordsworths had moved to Alfoxton House in Somerset, a few miles from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. The three of them, William, Dorothy, and Coleridge, worked together on Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798. The volume named no author. It contained Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" alongside Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". A second edition appeared in 1800 listing Wordsworth alone and including a preface that some scholars regard as a central text of Romantic literary theory.

  In that preface, Wordsworth set out what he believed a new kind of verse should look like: one grounded in the ordinary language "really used by men", as he put it, rather than the artificial poetic diction that had dominated much of the eighteenth century. He offered a definition of poetry that has been quoted ever since: "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility". He called his own poems in the collection "experimental". A further revised edition appeared in 1802, and a fourth and final edition in 1805. The 1807 collection Poems, in Two Volumes included "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" and was Wordsworth's attempt to build beyond the reputation Lyrical Ballads had created. Its reception was lukewarm.

• 5. The Prelude's Long Wait

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  During the harsh winter of 1798-99, stranded with Dorothy in the German city of Goslar while Coleridge thrived on intellectual stimulation elsewhere, Wordsworth produced some of his most enduring writing. He began the autobiographical poem then known only as "the poem to Coleridge", and he wrote the cluster of lyrics now called "The Lucy poems". Homesickness, extreme stress, and loneliness were the conditions in which that early version of The Prelude took shape.

  By 1804, he had decided to expand the poem into a prologue for a larger, never-finished philosophical work he intended to call The Recluse. He completed the first version in 1805, the same year his brother John died in the shipwreck of the Earl of Abergavenny. That loss, the source notes, affected him strongly and may have shaped his thinking about these works. He refused to publish The Prelude because he felt he could not release such a personal piece until The Recluse was finished. The Recluse was never finished.

  In 1814 he published The Excursion as the second part of The Recluse, even though neither the first nor the third part had been written. He did produce a verse Prospectus to The Recluse, containing what the source calls some of his most famous lines: a passage describing how the human mind and the external world are "exquisitely" fitted to each other, the two together accomplishing "the creation" that no lower name can describe. The artist and poet William Blake, who knew Wordsworth's work, was struck by Wordsworth's boldness in centring poetry on the mind itself. Blake wrote to his friend Henry Crabb Robinson that the relevant passage from The Excursion "caused him a bowel complaint which nearly killed him". The Prelude finally appeared in 1850, months after Wordsworth's death, when Mary published it under the title he had never chosen for it.

• 6. Later Years and the Laureateship

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  Wordsworth's appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland in 1813 gave him a stipend of £400 a year and the financial security he had long lacked. The position came, the source notes, at the cost of political independence. That same year, he and his family moved to Rydal Mount in Ambleside, where he remained for the rest of his life. His son Thomas had died that year at age six, six months after the death of his three-year-old daughter Catherine.

  By 1820, his reputation had turned. Critical opinion of his earlier work had reversed, and he was enjoying considerable popularity. In 1837, the Scottish poet and playwright Joanna Baillie described what it was like to be in his company: "He looks like a man that one must not speak to unless one has some sensible thing to say. However, he does occasionally converse cheerfully and well, and when one knows how benevolent and excellent he is, it disposes one to be very much pleased with him." In 1838 he received an honorary doctorate in Civil Law from the University of Durham. Oxford followed with the same degree the next year, and John Keble praised him there as the "poet of humanity". In 1842 the government awarded him a Civil List pension of £300 a year.

  Following the death of Robert Southey in 1843, the position of Poet Laureate came to Wordsworth. He initially refused, saying he was too old. He accepted only after Prime Minister Robert Peel assured him that "you shall have nothing required of you". Wordsworth thus became the only poet laureate to write no official verses. The sudden death of his daughter Dora in 1847, at age 42, struck the ageing poet hard. He gave up writing new material. He died at Rydal Mount on the 23rd of April 1850 from an aggravated case of pleurisy, and was buried at St Oswald's Church in Grasmere. In April 2020, Royal Mail issued ten first-class stamps to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, selecting an extract from his poem "The Rainbow" to appear on the stamp bearing his image.