Wordsworth, William

Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), poet, b. Cockermouth, Cumberland (now Cumbria), England.

William Wordsworth was one of England's greatest poets.

He grew up at Hawkshead in the Lake District and he loved the countryside.

For a time, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived in Dorsetshire (now Doreset) to be near another poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Together Wordsworth and Coleridge wrote a book of poems, Lyrical Ballads (1798). It contains one of Wordsworth's most popular poems, Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey. It is now thought that Dorothy Wordsworth helped create some of William's poems via her diary, which contained her own thoughts and ideas and gave William ideas for his poems.

In 1799, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved back to the Lake District and three years afterwards Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson.

Over the years, he published a long series of poems and in 1843 he was appointed the official poet of Britain, the Poet Laureate. Among his best known poems are To Daffodils, On Westminster Bridge and The Solitary Reaper.

In 1805, he wrote a long poem about his life called The Prelude and continued to revise this for the rest of his life. It was published after he died and is looked upon as a masterpiece.

From 1813, Wordsworth lived at Rydal Mount, near Grasmere, in the Lake District and you can visit his cottage there today.

See William Wordsworth William Wordsworth - The Major Works: including The Prelude (Oxford World's Classics)