William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was an English poet born in Cockermouth, in the Lake District of Cumbria, a landscape whose rivers, fells and light became the emotional bedrock of his poetry. Orphaned of both parents by his early teens, he was raised largely by relatives and educated at Cambridge, where a walking tour of revolutionary France left a lasting imprint on his political and poetic imagination. His years abroad also produced a daughter, Caroline, from whom war between Britain and France separated him for years.

Wordsworth is best remembered as the co-founder, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of English Romanticism through their joint collection Lyrical Ballads, which broke with 18th-century poetic convention by using plain language to explore ordinary lives and the workings of memory and nature. His long autobiographical poem often called The Prelude, along with works such as «I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud», «Michael: A Pastoral Poem» and «Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey», established the model of the poet as a solitary observer finding transcendence in landscape and childhood recollection.

His style favors meditative blank verse and a conversational yet elevated diction, tracing the growth of the individual mind through encounters with nature. Settled for most of his later life at Grasmere with his sister Dorothy and his wife Mary Hutchinson, he eventually became Poet Laureate, and his influence on subsequent English-language poetry, from the Victorians to modern nature writing, remains foundational.