William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth, one of the most accomplished and influential of England's romantic poets, was born and raised in Cockermouth, Cumberland in 1770. He was educated at Saint John's College at the University of Cambridge. In 1791, he traveled to France, where he became an enthusiastic convert to the ideals of the French Revolution. Wordsworth's first published poems appeared in 1793 but received little notice. In 1791 he and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth moved to Somersetshire, near the home of fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on a book of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads, published in the year 1798. This work is considered the beginning of the Romantic Movement in English Poetry. Lyrical Ballads represented a revolt against the aritificial classicism of contemporary English verse. It was greeted with hostility by most critics of the day. Wordsworth wrote a defense of the book for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, which appeared in 1800. He rejected the contemporary emphasis on the intellectual approach to poetry, maintaining that the scenes and events of every day life were the material from which poetry could and should be made.

In 1798 and 1799 Wordsworth and his sister went with Coleridge to Germany, where Wordsworth wrote several of his best lyrical verses, the "Lucy" poems, and began The Prelude. This introspective account of his own devlopment was completed in 1805 and, after revision, published posthumously in 1850. Many critics consider it Wordsworth's greatest work. The Wordsworths settled in Grasmere, Westmoreland, in the Lake District. Coleridge and poet Robert Southey lived nearby, and the three men became known as the Lake Poets. In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend. In 1807 Poems in Two Volumes was published.

I. FISH WOMEN--ON LANDING AT CALAIS