Wordsworth was a major poet whose work profoundly influenced his peers and poetic descendants. Born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, on 7 April 1770, Wordsworth was the second of five children in an affluent household. Losing his mother in 1778, Wordsworth was sent to Hawkshead grammar school, where he thrived as sympathetic teachers nurtured his taste for poetry, but the death of his father when Wordsworth was thirteen had far‐reaching consequences. Now orphans, his siblings were separated and he was thrown on the mercy of his extended family, who encouraged him to seek financial independence by becoming a clergyman. Precociously brilliant, Wordsworth began to write startlingly fluent poetry by fifteen, and had a poem, ‘On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’, published under a pseudonym in European Magazine at sixteen. Arriving at St John’s College, Cambridge in late October 1787, Wordsworth did not excel academically at university, owing at least in part to his feelings of antipathy towards the university structure. Choosing to embark on a walking tour in France in 1790 with Robert Jones, a college friend, Wordsworth shrugged off his family’s ambition for him to take holy orders. The pair also visited Switzerland, Italy, and Germany before returning to England. Reunited with his sister Dorothy in Forncett, near Norwich, the pair reminisced about his travels and the detailed letters he had sent to her, before Wordsworth moved to London in late January 1791. In London Wordsworth was thrown into a whirl of political debate that excited and inspired the young poet, and he chose to return to France, this time to Paris, on 30 November 1791. This visit proved life changing for Wordsworth, as, following his tourist activities, he met and fell in love with Annette Vallon. He followed his now pregnant lover to her hometown, Blois, where he met Captain Michel de Beaupuy, who features in The Prelude and influenced the English poet’s political views. Annette gave birth in December 1792 to a daughter, Caroline, but Wordsworth had already been forced to return to London, where he published his poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. Longing to return to Annette, he was barred from doing so by the British declaration of war on France in February 1793 following the execution of Louis XVI.
Such distress compounded Wordsworth’s revolutionary fervour, and his pamphlet, A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, with its principled defence of regicide, would have created serious trouble for the poet had it been published (it eventually appeared in 1876). Heading on foot to visit Robert Jones, Wordsworth was then reunited with Dorothy in 1794 in the north of England. Returning to the south of England in February 1795, Wordsworth began to associate with the most prominent radicals in the country, including William Godwin. However, by 1796, Wordsworth was increasingly disillusioned by Godwin’s anti‐emotional brand of rationalism. When he moved away from London, John and Azariah Pinney offered Wordsworth the chance to stay at one of their father’s properties, Racedown Lodge in Dorset. By September 1795 Wordsworth and Dorothy had moved in together. The environment was excellent for Wordsworth to begin composing some of his most important poetry, such as the earliest draft of The Ruined Cottage; he also redrafted what would become Adventures on Salisbury Plain, and wrote The Borderers. Coleridge’s visit in 1797 (after Wordsworth had visited him at Nether Stowey in the same year) was vital for his poetic development.
Coleridge’s visit sparked a plan to travel to Germany for Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge, and Lyrical Ballads was designed as a means of funding the trip. Arriving in Germany in autumn 1798, the Wordsworths and Coleridge parted company, and the Wordsworths headed for Goslar. Lacking language skills and money, they were confined to their quarters during a harsh winter, and Wordsworth wrote the first draft of what would become The Prelude, before returning to England in April 1799 and deciding to remain in the Lake District. Marrying Mary Hutchinson in 1802, Wordsworth put down roots in Grasmere, close to Greta Hall, Keswick, where Coleridge and his family had moved in 1800 and where Southey and his family joined them in 1803. The first child, John, was born in 1803, Dorothy (known as Dora) in 1804, Thomas in 1806, Catharine in 1808, and the last child, William, in 1810. Domestic tensions grew between Coleridge and the Wordsworth family, and Coleridge left their circle in 1804.
The death of John Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s sailor brother, on 5 February 1805 was a heavy tragedy for the family, and the years between 1806 and 1813 proved difficult for Wordsworth. He struggled with financial issues, his disintegrating relationship with Coleridge, and fears about the direction of his poetic vocation. His Poems, in Two Volumes of 1807 received many negative notices, particularly from Francis Jeffrey. Two of his children, Catherine and Thomas, died within months of each other in 1812, the year in which the family moved again, this time to a permanent home, Rydal Mount. Lord Lonsdale made Wordsworth the Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland and the Penrith area of Cumberland in 1813, easing his financial concerns. The Excursion (1814) announced his continued poetic ambition to the world, and enlarged his audience. Touring the continent in the early 1820s allowed Wordsworth to reacquaint himself with his daughter Caroline, and he also devoted himself in 1820 to work on a four‐volume set of his collected works, which he oversaw. Further complete works were issued in 1827, 1832, 1836, 1845, and 1849–50. Yarrow Revisited, published in 1835, succeeded commercially, with new editions in 1836 and 1839. Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842) was Wordsworth’s final original collection. He was made poet laureate in 1843, but he continued to revise his poetry until his death in 1850, after which The Prelude was first published.
Stephen Gill, ‘Wordsworth, William (1770–1850)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2010 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29973, accessed 7 September 2015]; William Wordsworth (1770–1850): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/29973; Duncan Wu, ‘William Wordsworth (1770–1850)’, in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4th edn (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), pp. 420–5.