Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)

English poet, with his friend S. T. Coleridge one of the early leaders of Romanticism in England, known for his worship of nature, his humanitarianism, his early sympathy with democratic liberalism, his interest in the lives, daily pursuits, and common speech of lowly people, and his Platonistically tinged pantheism. He was particularly interested in instituting a reform in poetic diction which would employ "a selection of language really used by men," as he proposes in his famous Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and many of his best-known poems make use of what the poet regarded as this "real" language. In later times these came to be considered sentimental and almost comically prosaic, failing in their objective.

Wordsworth's most ambitious works are The Prelude (published in 1850) and the uncompleted The Recluse, long poems autobiographical in character, and The Excursion ( 1814), a long "philosophical" poem. An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches were his earliest works, published in 1793; the bulk of his best-known poetry is contained in Lyrical Ballads ( 1798), which he published jointly with Coleridge. Among well-known shorter poems of Wordsworth are Alice Fell; Michael; Simon Lee; the Lucy poems; Resolution and Independence; The Solitary Reaper; Peter Bell; The Idiot Boy; I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud; Elegiac Stanzas; Nuns Fret Not; The World Is Too Much With Us; Tintern Abbey; Ode On Intimations of Immortality.

In his early youth, Wordsworth was influenced by the ideas of J. J. Rousseau and William Godwin and was an enthusiast for the French Revolution. He stayed in France for a while in 1792 and had a love affair with Annette Vallon, evidence of which was uncovered only in the 20th century. As he grew older, he became increasingly conservative in his political views and orthodox in his religion, living peacefully in the Lake Country of northern England. In 1843 he was appointed Poet Laureate, succeeding Robert Southey.