English poet. A leader of Romanticism, Wordsworth is best known as the poet who
reawakened his readers to the beauty of nature, describing the emotions and
perceptive insights which natural beauty arouses in the sensitive observer. He
advocated a poetry of simple feeling and the use of the language of ordinary
speech, demonstrated in the unadorned simplicity of lyrics such as ‘To the cuckoo’
and ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. He collaborated with English poet Samuel Taylor
Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads (1798) (which included ‘Tintern Abbey’, a meditation on
his response to nature). His most notable individual poems were published in Poems
(1807) (including ‘Intimations of Immortality’). At intervals between then and 1839
he revised The Prelude (posthumously published in 1850), the first part of his
uncompleted philosophical, creative, and spiritual autobiography in verse. He was
appointed poet laureate in 1843.
Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland. Orphaned at age 13, he was
educated at Cambridge University. In 1792 he returned to England from a visit to
France, having fallen in love with Annette Vallon (1766–1841), with whom he had an
illegitimate daughter. Religious differences, poverty, and the French Revolution
prevented him from marrying Annette. A legacy of £900 encouraged him to devote
himself to poetry, and in 1797 he moved with his sister Dorothy Wordsworth to
Somerset, where he lived near Coleridge. From 1799 he lived in the Lake District,
and in 1802 he married his cousin Mary Hutchinson (1770–1859). His later years were
marred by his sister’s ill health and the death of his daughter Dora in 1847.