William Wordsworth was born in his hometown of Cockermouth, England on April 7th, 1770. The town is located in Cumberland County in the Lake District, the Northwestern part of England. This area was noticeably less settled than the rest of England. It had many forests, mountains and obviously that Wordsworth could explore. He loved to take hikes and he deeply appreciated the natural beauty that was all around him; His first poem is even titled “An Evening Walk”. He lived in his hometown from his birth to the age of seventeen and from age twenty-nine until his death.
He was the second son of John and Ann Wordsworth. They were a lower-middle class family, who did, however, have the most impressive house in Cockermouth. The house came with Wordsworth’s father’s job as personal lawyer to the unpopular Sir James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, who gave the family a bad reputation. Wordsworth’s father made him memorize poems and/or parts of poems at a very young age; he became well accustomed to the complex language of poets such as William Shakespeare and John Milton. This helped him develop an extremely good memory and a keen interest in poetry, which probably heavily influenced his choice to become a writer.
He was enrolled in Hawkshead School at age eight when his mother died from pneumonia, which left John Wordsworth unable to care for five children. The school had a great reputation for making its students well-prepared for university. Wordsworth was educated in mathematics, science, English grammar and composition, the Classical languages, French, and Dancing. He loved the scenic area around the school and often went roaming, tree-climbing, skating, swimming, fishing and hunting with his friends. When he and his best friend went walking they would recite nature poems, sometimes making up their own lines and; though, Wordsworth also enjoyed exploring nature on his own. His father died in 1783 around the same time that Wordsworth had decided that he wanted to be a poet.
He later entered Cambridge University, where his interests had shifted entirely towards languages and writing. One of his uncles, who had some political influence, had made plans to set up a career for him as a clergyman, but Wordsworth did not want to follow in those footsteps. In his second year he wrote his first extensive poem entitled “An Evening Walk”, which reaches nearly four-hundred lines.
He was associated with a small group of free thinkers, including radical philosophers. Wordsworth was a strong follower of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Around the same time, he became very interested in the French Revolution and a French lady named Annette Vallon, who was very different from him politically and personality-wise. Annette gave birth to their first child, Anne Worsworth, but Wordsworth had to leave France when he could no longer support himself financially. He published his first two extensive poems in books, but eared little profit. He did, however, gain the attention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who became a very close friend whom he would spend a lot of time with. His next major works included two lyrical ballads, or literary ballads; these were initially not well accepted, but are now viewed as breakthroughs in English Poetry. Wordsworth faced a lot of criticism, but was determined to show the world that he was as great a poet as he saw himself to be.
After he had been writing and publishing productively, having created multiple volumes of poetry, he eventually got the recognition that he deserved. He was a very popular poet in the 1820s, when he was in his 50s. Wordsworth had launched a major revolution in poetic style, exemplifying Romantic ideologies and obsoleting Neoclassicism. In 1839, He was given the honorable title of Poet-Laureate of England, even in his less productive old age, in a time when poets of that title were usually expected to productively create poems for public occasions. He lived to be eighty-one years old, dying of Pleurisy in 1850. His last work was a philosophical, autobiographical poem, which he never finished. He is criticized for this and for being, as some critics say, egotistical. Though, it cannot be denied that William Wordsworth was an incredibly influential poet, who defined British Romanticism and was an expert in stirring emotions and describing aesthetically the beauty all around him.
Sources:
Bloom's BioCritiques: William Wordsworth; Bloom's BioCritiques; 2003, p5-52, 48p
Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition; January 2003, p1-2
Critical Survey of Poetry, Second Revised Edition; September 2002, p1-12
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