Wordsworth, William

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.