View transcript 0:10Skip to 0 minutes and 10 seconds I've come up to an area of land behind the Jerwood Centre, and I've come to look at a remarkable object that's cared for by the Wordsworth Trust. I'm joined by Kate Ingle, who's a PhD student working on the writing of Dorothy Wordsworth. So Kate, can you tell me what this remarkable object is? This object was known as the rock of names to the Wordsworths. And in the summer of 1802, William, Dorothy, and their closest friends inscribed their initials into this very rock. Wow, so 1802, they've been here about 18 months. In that stage, they're getting to know the area. Yes. 0:43Skip to 0 minutes and 43 seconds And as well as it being a particularly happy summer, marking local objects becomes important for the Wordsworths in developing their sense of home, which is what we'll think about today. So if we look at this rock, we can actually see their initials carved into it. Can you talk us through this, Kate? Tell us whose initials stand for whom.

Yes, so here we have a WW, which is William Wordsworth. And we have his sister, Dorothy, there. You can see a DW. We have underneath here, there's John Wordsworth, which is their younger brother. Then we have STC, which is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet and their very good friend. 1:24Skip to 1 minute and 24 seconds And then down here, we have Sara Hutchinson, who was one of the Wordsworths' closest friends. And then we also have MH for Mary Hutchinson, who was to become Wordsworth's wife. So what a fantastic collection of carvings from the whole community there. So they just come out here from Dove Cottage and carve their names on the rock, did they? No this rock was actually located five miles away up at Wythburn alongside the tarn Thirlmere Right, so how does how does a rock move five miles down here to the back garden as it were of Dove Cottage? Well, it's a fascinating story. In the 1870s, the Manchester authorities were enlarging Thirlmere into the reservoir that we know today.

2:08Skip to 2 minutes and 8 seconds And they blew up the rock, and fortunately, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley collected the fragments of the blown up rock. So who was Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley? He's a local conservationist who was one of the founding members of the National Trust. And he was also a member of the Wordsworth Society, which was set up to promote and protect Wordsworth's work and poetry. So a very important man, a major figure in the kind of conservation of the area by the sounds of things. So when does the rock get here into the back of the Jerwood Centre? Well, the fragments were reset into this rock face in about 1984. Right, and so why this particular rock. 2:50Skip to 2 minutes and 50 seconds You mentioned that it was five miles up the road from here, near the reservoir. Now why did they choose to choose that site to carve their initials on? Well, it was actually a meeting point between the two houses, and it was approximately halfway between Dove Cottage here in Grasmere and Coleridge's lodgings at Greta Hall over in Keswick.

And the two poets and their friends would meet as they were walking over to see one another. Right, so it's a sort of personal landmark in the landscape if you like. Yes, exactly. It's exactly a literal meeting place, and it shows how they use this landscape. But it also becomes symbolic of their friendship. The place becomes invested with emotion. 3:32Skip to 3 minutes and 32 seconds Right, so would you say this is the main example of that kind of relationship to landscape? Are there other examples of places that take on these special meanings? Yes, there are plenty across Grasmere. There is Sara's Gate, which is named after Sara Hutchinson. There is also John's Grove named after William and Dorothy's younger brother. And Wordsworth also wrote a set of poems called the "Poems on the Naming of Places". So what kind of place names do they have? Well, they might mark a local object and name it at a particular site where they can see a very nice view of the landscape. It might be along a favourite walking route. 4:11Skip to 4 minutes and 11 seconds Or it might be where a particular memorable incident has happened.

So for example, in the poem "To Joanna," which recalls Joanna Hutchinson's first visit over to Grasmere, which was Sara and Mary's younger sister. The poem opens with the poet carving her name into a rock, which they had stopped at. So we've seen quite a lot of this carving from Wordsworth. When we were at Hawkshead the other day, we looked at his school desk, which had W. Wordsworth carved in it. You just mentioned a poem which involves carving onto the rock, and now we've got the rock of names. Is this graffiti? Is this vandalism? Yes and no. 4:50Skip to 4 minutes and 50 seconds It is in the sense that we might mark our being in a particular place at a particular time, and it is in the sense that graffiti celebrates a code of the private known to a few. And the Wordsworths, when they marked these places, it is a kind of possession of the local that strengthens their bonds as a group. The significance of these markings rely on the fact that people won't know them. However, this does differ from graffiti because it isn't about vandalism, and it's not about protest.

The Wordsworths' project is about settling in Grasmere, and it's about personalising place. 5:27Skip to 5 minutes and 27 seconds And if we think about the objects, the choice of objects that they're choosing to mark such as a gate and a rock, these are all very ordinary objects that could be easily overlooked much like the unhewn stones in the poem "Michael" that you've been looking at in earlier weeks. And Remember, this landscape would have been filled with markers, such as milestones, that were made for and known to the local people and for those that use this landscape. And so the Wordsworths are doing this on a much more smaller and more private scale. How interesting. And that link back to "Michael" is really helpful I think. So their relationship between landscape and writing is operating at a number of levels here. 6:09Skip to 6 minutes and 9 seconds They're marking the landscape, carving their names into it. They're naming the landscape, giving these particular places special names, and they're also writing about the landscape. What does that tell us about the relationship between the Wordsworths and landscape?

Well, I think for the Wordsworths, a sense of place and particularly home is something that has to be made, and it has to be practised. And it also has to be shared by a very close group of friends, and it requires a very active relationship between the landscape and those that use it. 6:42Skip to 6 minutes and 42 seconds And so a shared use of landscape can enhance friendship, and at the same time, friendly experiences in place can bring forth these feelings of togetherness, community, and a sense of home. So these special names that they had for particular places, did they actually use them in their everyday lives? Yes, they did. Coleridge uses them in his notebooks. Dorothy uses them in her journals, and she also uses them in correspondence. And for Dorothy, these names are particularly important because she uses them in a very specific way to recollect feelings of friendship. So for example, in the summer of 1802, Mary and Sara Hutchinson are absent from Grasmere, and William and Dorothy write them a joint letter.

7:31Skip to 7 minutes and 31 seconds And in Dorothy's portion of the letter, she recalls that her and William have been walking in John's Grove at night. And she writes to them, "we thought of you, dear friends. Dear friends, we shall be together before the next full moon". So the names then become just as important as the places. Well, what a lovely point to end on. The names are as important as the places. Thank you very much, Kate, for showing us this fantastic engaging object and for explaining its significance as well. It's a really good symbol, I think, of the relationship between the Wordsworths and the landscape and writing. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. The Rock of Names In this short video, Professor Simon Bainbridge talks to Kate Ingle, a research student at Lancaster University, about ‘The Rock of Names’, a remarkable object which is cared for by The Wordsworth Trust. In the summer of 1802, William, Dorothy and their close friends, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary and Sara Hutchinson carved their initials into a rock face.

Simon and Kate discuss the importance of inscription and the naming of places to William and Dorothy as they settled into Grasmere. William and his friends are generally referred to as ‘The Wordsworth Circle’ and this video mentions several members of the Circle. If you want to find out more about the different members, you can find their biographies in the downloads section below. After watching this video, reflect on whether you have created any names, or nick-names for special places? Think about the type of places you named, how you named them and who uses these names. Then turn to the next step which examines Wordsworthian place naming more closely. © Lancaster University William Wordsworth - Biography and Works. Search Texts, Read Online. Discuss. William Wordsworth Biography of William Wordsworth William Wordsworth (1770-1850), British poet, credited with ushering in the English Romantic Movement with the publication of Lyrical Ballads(1798) in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge . William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the Lake District. His father was John Wordsworth, Sir James Lowther's attorney.

The magnificent landscape deeply affected Wordsworth's imagination and gave him a love of nature. He lost his mother when he was eight and five years later his father. The domestic problems separated Wordsworth from his beloved and neurotic sister Dorothy, who was a very important person in his life. With the help of his two uncles, Wordsworth entered a local school and continued his studies at Cambridge University. Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787, when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine . In that same year he entered St. John's College, Cambridge, from where he took his B.A. in 1791. During a summer vacation in 1790 Wordsworth went on a walking tour through revolutionary France and also traveled in Switzerland. On his second journey in France, Wordsworth had an affair with a French girl, Annette Vallon, a daughter of a barber-surgeon, by whom he had a illegitimate daughter Anne Caroline. The affair was basis of the poem "Vaudracour and Julia", but otherwise Wordsworth did his best to hide the affair from posterity. In 1795 he met Coleridge.

Wordsworth's financial situation became better in 1795 when he received a legacy and was able to settle at Racedown, Dorset, with his sister Dorothy. Encouraged by Coleridge and stimulated by the close contact with nature, Wordsworth composed his first masterwork, Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." About 1798 he started to write a large and philosophical autobiographical poem, completed in 1805, and published posthumously in 1850 under the title The Prelude. Wordsworth spent the winter of 1798-99 with his sister and Coleridge in Germany, where he wrote several poems, including the enigmatic 'Lucy' poems. After return he moved Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and in 1802 married Mary Hutchinson. They cared for Wordsworth's sister Dorothy for the last 20 years of her life. Wordsworth's second verse collection, Poems, In Two Volumes, appeared in 1807. Wordsworth's central works were produced between 1797 and 1808.

His poems written during middle and late years have not gained similar critical approval. Wordsworth's Grasmere period ended in 1813. He was appointed official distributor of stamps for Westmoreland. He moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside, where he spent the rest of his life. In later life Wordsworth abandoned his radical ideas and became a patriotic, conservative public man. In 1843 he succeeded Robert Southey (1774-1843) as England's poet laureate. Wordsworth died on April 23, 1850. The above biography is copyrighted. Do not republish it without permission. Forum Discussions on William Wordsworth Recent Forum Posts on William Wordsworth Poem: The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth :hurray: Hey Guys It's my first time Here :) Can anyone help me by correcting my essay which contains an introductory sentence, support sentences and conclusion also give me a feedback, but someone who really does know literature? The question is: describe and explain one characteristics that is presented in the poem!

In the poet of William Wordsworth " The World Is too much with us" who is an English poetry and one that is inspired by nature, he uses different characteristics of the great movement of Romanticism. The main Characteristic is the description of nature, he describes it as something damaged by the society. Among these descriptions: " The sea that bares her bosom ... Posted By JasminEng in Wordsworth, William || 2 Replies Geography's Influence on William Wordsworth Hello. I have been working on a project for my British Literature class on how geography was an influence on William Wordsworth's poetry. If anyone knows of any other places that contribited to the creation of a poem, other than the ones I have listed, I would be very appreciative. Places: Dove Cottage Rydal Mount Alfoxden (Alfoxton) Tintern Abbey Lake Esthwaite Richmond, upon the Thames Thank you in advance!... Posted By Hunter Bennett in Wordsworth, William || 1 Reply Romantic poetry (Wordsworth) I am wondering what you all think of these poems? The Boy of Winander: Nutting: I read both of these out loud in the videos.

The Boy of Winander is from the Fifth Book of Wordsworth's Prelude (one of my favorite parts. Nutting is another autobiographical poem written is that Wordsworthian style of guilt an the innocence of youth and the personification of nature (in this case, a tree). I am currently writing a 25 page term paper on Wordsworth's Prelude, and these idea... Posted By Spinoza in Wordsworth, William || 0 Replies i have to finish my poet biography and I need to describe him in one word/ phrase. When you think of Wordsworth what do you think of? for example.. is he ambitious, shy, competitive? thats what I'm looking for. Thanks!... Posted By beckaboo727 in Wordsworth, William || 13 Replies Wordsworth's Personality I recently read a statement about it sometimes being hard to separate Wordsworth's poetry from his unattractive/repellent personality. I was a bit surprised by it. Although I have found some of his behavior in the Annette Vallon affair rather reprehensible, my tremendous love of Wordsworth's poetry has perhaps led me to associate the man too closely with his work.

I know there were also disagreements with Coleridge in the later years, but I am not familiar with the details. Sometimes I can be a very naive reader, when I love an author as I do Wordsworth. Anyways, any thoughts?... Posted By L.M. The Third in Wordsworth, William || 13 Replies The Prelude According to the site data, "About 1798 he started to write a large and philosophical autobiographical poem, completed in 1805, and published posthumously in 1850 under the title The Prelude." As an assignment for class, at Montery Peninsula College, I analyzed part of Book First, yet it is not part of the works accessible on this site. Perhaps I missed it and if I did, please point me to it on the site. If not on the site why not, i.e. was the work edited by someone else. The lines analyzed from Book First are at 351-371. In the text, "Western Literature in a World Context" Vol. 2. The lines begin ï¿½The mind of man is framed even like the breath And harmony of music. There ...

Posted By rherendeen in Wordsworth, William || 1 Reply Tintern Abbey: A Powerful Prelude to Nature "These beauteous forms, through a long absence, have not been to me. As is a landscape is to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din of towns and cities, I have owed to them, in hours of weariness, sensations sweet, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, with tranquil restoration:--feelings too of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, as have no slight or trivial influence on that best portion of a good man's life. His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. " -Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour. July 13, 1798. After returning to this beauti... Posted By kristinalauren in Wordsworth, William || 0 Replies Hey, does anybody know if Lucy in Wordsworth's poems is a real person or not?...

Posted By ramguy2014 in Wordsworth, William || 2 Replies Hi all:) i was just wondering if you were able to give me some tips on how William Wordsworth's context has influenced his choice of poetic devices in his works, mainly tintern abbey, daffodils and early spring cheers :)... Posted By caitlin123 in Wordsworth, William || 2 Replies Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey "Once again/ Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs/... The day is come when I again repose/ Here, under this dark sycamore" (890). In Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth revisits the bucolic setting of his childhood, and in doing so mirrors the passing of his childhood into manhood with the changing of his dwelling from country to city. While he once loved the freedom of living in the country, in the city he must grapple with the "heavy and the weary weight/ Of all this unintelligible world" (891). But the one reassuring thing about this poem is that Wordsworth doesn't leave the country behind.

Indeed, while he is living in the city and trying to succeed in man's own making, society, he says that ... Posted By Mike West in Wordsworth, William || 3 Replies The world is too much with us; late and soon William Wordsworthï¿½s sonnet ï¿½The World Is Too Much with Us; Late and Soonï¿½ addresses the loss of nature in a consumerist society. Nature is a common theme in Wordsworthï¿½s work and in his sonnet he addresses the diminishing connection to nature he experiences due to consumerism. Wordsworthï¿½s sonnet is introduced with a juxtaposition of consumerism and nature. ï¿½Getting and spending, we lay waste to our powers: Little we see in Nature that is oursï¿½ (1-2) Wordsworth compares obtaining and spending to nature because nature cannot be owned regardless of the price. The juxtaposition illustrates the purity of nature in its inability to be owned and the greed of consumerism in its drive to own al...

Posted By Jeffersonair69 in Wordsworth, William || 1 Reply Ode: Intimations of Immortality In ï¿½The Gospel According To Thomas,ï¿½ Jesus is asked where the kingdom of Heaven is and he replies that the kingdom of Heaven is here on earth but man does not see it. In reading ï¿½Ode: Intimations of Immortalityï¿½ I was reminded of this in particular with stanza five: ï¿½Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our lifeï¿½s star, hath elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar: not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!ï¿½ We are born complete and whole; our knowledge of this fact becomes a fading memory as we age. Woodsworth can remember having the ex...

Posted By michaelonlyson in Wordsworth, William || 4 Replies William Wordsworth | Poetry Foundation William Wordsworth Poet Details 1770–1850 Discussing prose written by poets, Joseph Brodsky has remarked, “the tradition of dividing literature into poetry and prose dates from the beginnings of prose, since it was only in prose that such a distinction could be made.” This insight is worth bearing in mind when considering the various prose works of the poet William Wordsworth. For Wordsworth poetic composition was a primary mode of expression; prose was secondary. Wordsworth seems to have written prose mostly in order to find a structure for his poetic beliefs and political enthusiasms. Over the course of a prolific poetic career, in fact, Wordsworth produced little prose, though he did compose two works of lasting general interest, one on poetics—“Preface to Lyrical Ballads”—and the other on the landscape of his native region—his tourist handbook, A Guide through the District of the Lakes, which retains more than a local interest as geographical background to his poems and biography.

Wordsworth is not, of course, remembered as a prose writer but as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature. Yet recently, certain critics, as part of a revisionist critique of older interpretations of Wordsworth’s verse, have turned to his political essays for evidence, especially concerning the poet's rejection of his youthful radicalism. Wordsworth's political writings, especially “A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff,” The Convention of Cintra (1809), and Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland (1818), while historically significant, are of primary interest as background for the poetry: for Wordsworth, poetics always determined politics. William Wordsworth, son of John and Ann Cookson Wordsworth, was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland. The Wordsworth children—Richard, William, Dorothy, John, and Christopher—remained close throughout their lives, and the support Dorothy offered William during his long career has attained legendary status. John Wordsworth, William's father, was legal agent to Sir James Lowther, Baronet of Lowther (later Earl of Lonsdale), a political magnate and property owner.

Wordsworth's deep love for the “beauteous forms” of the natural world was established early. The Wordsworth children seem to have lived in a sort of rural paradise along the Derwent River, which ran past the terraced garden below the ample house whose tenancy John Wordsworth had obtained from his employer before his marriage to Ann Cookson. William attended the grammar school near Cockermouth Church and Ann Birkett's school at Penrith, the home of his maternal grandparents. The intense lifelong friendship between Dorothy and William Wordsworth probably began when they, along with Mary Hutchinson, attended school at Penrith. Wordsworth's early childhood beside the Derwent and his schooling at Cockermouth are vividly recalled in various passages of The Prelude and in shorter poems such as the sonnet “Address from the Spirit of Cockermouth Castle.” His experiences in and around Hawkshead, where William and Richard Wordsworth began attending school in 1779, would also provide the poet with a store of images and sensory experience that he would continue to draw on throughout his poetic career, but especially during the “great decade” of 1798 to 1808. This childhood idyll was not to continue, however.

In March of 1778 Ann Wordsworth died while visiting a friend in London. In June 1778 Dorothy was sent to live in Halifax, Yorkshire, with her mother's cousin Elizabeth Threlkeld, and she lived with a succession of relatives thereafter. She did not see William again until 1787. In December of 1783 John Wordsworth, returning home from a business trip, lost his way and was forced to spend a cold night in the open. Very ill when he reached home, he died 30 December. Though separated from their sister, all the boys eventually attended school together at Hawkshead, staying in the house of Ann Tyson. In 1787, despite poor finances caused by ongoing litigation over Lord Lowther's debt to John Wordsworth's estate, Wordsworth went up to Cambridge as a sizar in St. John's College. As he himself later noted, Wordsworth's undergraduate career was not distinguished by particular brilliance. In the third book of The Prelude Wordsworth recorded his reactions to life at Cambridge and his changing attitude toward his studies.

During his last summer as an undergraduate, he and his college friend Robert Jones—much influenced by William Coxe's Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Swisserland (1779)—decided to make a tour of the Alps, departing from Dover on 13 July 1790. Though Wordsworth, encouraged by his headmaster William Taylor, had been composing verse since his days at Hawkshead Grammar School, his poetic career begins with this first trip to France and Switzerland. During this period he also formed his early political opinions—especially his hatred of tyranny. These opinions would be profoundly transformed over the coming years but never completely abandoned. Wordsworth was intoxicated by the combination of revolutionary fervor he found in France—he and Jones arrived on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille—and by the impressive natural beauty of the countryside and mountains. Returning to England in October, Wordsworth was awarded a pass degree from Cambridge in January 1791, spent several months in London, and then traveled to Jones's parents' home in North Wales.

During 1791 Wordsworth's interest in both poetry and politics gained in sophistication, as natural sensitivity strengthened his perceptions of the natural and social scenes he encountered. In a letter to William Matthews , a Cambridge friend, he lamented his lack of Italian and weak Spanish—he would have liked to be reading modern poetry. Wordsworth's passion for democracy, as is clear in his “Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” (also called “Apology for the French Revolution”), is the result of his two youthful trips to France. In November 1791 Wordsworth returned to France, where he attended sessions of the National Assembly and the Jacobin Club. In December he met and fell in love with Annette Vallon, and at the beginning of 1792 he became the close friend of an intellectual and philosophical army officer, Michel Beaupuy, with whom he discussed politics. Wordsworth had been an instinctive democrat since childhood, and his experiences in revolutionary France strengthened and developed his convictions. His sympathy for ordinary people would remain with Wordsworth even after his revolutionary fervor had been replaced with the “softened feudalism” he endorsed in his Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland in 1818.

While still in France, Wordsworth began work on the first extended poetic efforts of his maturity, Descriptive Sketches, which was published in 1793, after the appearance of a poem written at Cambridge, An Evening Walk (1793). Having exhausted his money, he left France in early December 1792 before Annette Vallon gave birth to his child Caroline. Back in England, the young radical cast about for a suitable career. As a fervent democrat, he had serious reservations about “vegetating in a paltry curacy,” though he had written to William Matthews from France in May 1792 that he intended to be ordained the following winter or spring. Perhaps this plan was why he was reading sermons early in 1793, when he came across a sermon by Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, on “the Wisdom and Goodness of God” in making both rich and poor, with an appendix denouncing the French Revolution. His democratic sympathies aroused, he spent several weeks in February and March working on a reply. By this time, his relationship with Annette Vallon had become known to his English relatives, and any further opportunity of entering the Church was foreclosed.

In any case Wordsworth had been reading atheist William Godwin’s recently published Political Justice (1793), and had come powerfully under its sway. “A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff”—not published until 1876, when it was included in Alexandere B. Grosart’s edition of Wordsworth’s prose—is the youthful poet and democrat’s indignant reply to the forces of darkness, repression, and monarchy. Its prose shares something of the revolutionary clarity of Thomas Paine’s. Wordsworth, in fact, quoted Paine in his refutation of Bishop Watson’s appendix: “If you had looked in the articles of the rights of man, you would have found your efforts superseded. Equality, without which liberty cannot exist, is to be met with in perfection in that state in which no distinctions are admitted but such as have evidently for their object the general good.” Just how radical Wordsworth’s political beliefs were during this period can be judged from other passages in this “Letter”: “At a period big with the fate of the human race, I am sorry that you attach so much importance to the personal sufferings of the late royal martyr....

You wish it to be supposed that you are one of those who are unpersuaded of the guilt of Louis XVI. If you had attended to the history of the French revolution as minutely as its importance demands, so far from stopping to bewail his death, you would rather have regretted that the blind fondness of his people had placed a human being in that monstrous situation....” Remarking upon the stripping of property from the French priesthood, Wordsworth asserted: “The assembly were true to justice and refused to compromise the interests of the Nation by accepting as a satisfaction the insidious offerings of compulsive charity. They enforced their right: they took from the clergy a considerable portion of their wealth, and applied it to the alleviation of the national misery.” “A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” is remarkable partly because Wordsworth seems to have begun relinquishing its tenets almost as soon as he had composed them.

Though he remained for the time being a strong supporter of the French Revolution, the poetic side of Wordsworth’s personality began asserting itself, causing the poet to reexamine, between 1793 and 1796, his adherence to Godwin’s rationalistic model of human behavior, upon which Wordsworth’s republicanism was largely founded. Whether “A Letter to Bishop the of Llandaff” remained unpublished through caution or circumstance is not clear. As Wordsworth turned his attention to poetry, he developed, through the process of poetic composition, his own theory of human nature, one that had very little to do with Godwin’s rationalism. During this period Wordsworth met another radical young man with literary aspirations, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1794 and 1795 Wordsworth divided his time between London and the Lake Country, at one point telling William Matthews that he would rather be in London because cataracts and mountains were good occasionally but would not do for constant companions. Nevertheless, in September 1795 William and Dorothy Wordsworth settled at Racedown Lodge in Dorset, where they would live for two years.

In The Prelude Wordsworth wrote that his sister “Maintained a saving intercourse / With my true self,” and “preserved me still / A poet.” At Racedown Wordsworth composed The Borderers, a tragedy in which he came fully to terms with Godwin’s philosophy, finally rejecting it as an insufficiently rich approach to life for a poet. Then Wordsworth for the first time found his mature poetic voice, writing The Ruined Cottage, which would be published in 1814 as part of The Excursion, itself conceived as one part of a masterwork, The Recluse, which was to worry Wordsworth throughout his life, a poem proposed to him by Coleridge and planned as a full statement of the two poets’ emerging philosophy of life. In 1797, to be closer to Coleridge, the Wordsworth’s moved to Alfoxden House, near the village of Nether Stowey. Because of the odd habits of the household—especially their walking over the countryside at all hours—the local population suspected that the Wordsworth’s and their visitors were French spies, and a government agent was actually dispatched to keep an eye on them.

The years between 1797 and 1800 mark the period of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s close collaboration, and also the beginning of Wordsworth’s mature poetic career. Wordsworth wrote the poems that would go into the 1798 and 1800 editions of Lyrical Ballads—poems such as “Tintern Abbey,” “Expostulation and Reply,” “The Tables Turned,” “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” and “Michael” (written, Wordsworth told James Fox, “to shew that men who did not wear fine clothes can feel deeply”). During 1798 Wordsworth also worked on a piece of prose setting out his evolving ideas on justice and morality. Called the “Essay on Morals” by later editors, it was set aside and never finished. Wordsworth seems to have been attempting to work out and justify his changing political and social ideas—ideas that had begun to develop intuitively during the process of poetic composition. The poet in Wordsworth was beginning to dominate the democrat, and the poet found a political philosophy based on power, violence, and reason anathema.

In the “Essay on Morals” Wordsworth concerns himself with the relationship between writing and political justice, and, though he had explicitly rejected Edmund Burke’s philosophy in his scorching “Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff,” he seems to be developing a Burkean idea of community. In September 1798 the Wordsworth’s set off for Germany with Coleridge, returning separately, after some disagreements, in May 1799. In Germany Wordsworth continued to write poems, and when he returned to England he began to prepare a new edition of Lyrical Ballads. The second edition—that of 1800—included an extended preface by Wordsworth, explaining his reasons for choosing to write as he had and setting out a personal poetics that has remained influential and controversial to the present day. For Victorian readers such as Matthew Arnold, who tended to venerate Wordsworth, the preface was a fount of wisdom; but the modernists were deeply suspicious of Wordsworth’s reliance on feeling: poets such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, while they could accept the strictures on poetic diction, found the underlying theory unacceptable.

Subsequent critics have focused on the literary and historical sources of Wordsworth’s ideas, demonstrating that, while the poet certainly reinvented English poetic diction, his theories were deeply rooted in the practice of earlier poets, especially John Milton. This preface, Wordsworth’s only extended statement of his poetics, has become the source of many of the commonplaces and controversies of poetic theory and criticism. For Wordsworth, poetry, which should be written in “the real language of men,” is nevertheless “the spontaneous overflow of feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” The “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (revised and expanded many times for later editions) is not a systematic poetics, but a partly polemical, partly pedantic, and still problematic statement of Wordsworth’s beliefs about poetry and poetic language. The preface in all its versions is highly discursive, the poet “thinking aloud” in an attempt to formulate ideas about poetry based on poems he has already written. It is important to remember when reading the preface that it both chronologically and logically follows the composition of most of the poems.

The two central ideas of the preface are the need for reforming poetic diction—which, according to Wordsworth, had become far too artificial—and the role of the poet in society, which Wordsworth saw as having become too marginal. He had also come to the conclusion that the troubles of society were specifically urban in nature. This view finds eloquent expression in Wordsworth’s most powerful early poem, “Tintern Abbey.” Thinking of the way in which his memories of the Wye River valley had sustained him, Wordsworth wrote: Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet [.] The poem concludes with a meditation on the power of nature to prevail against the false and superficial “dreary intercourse of daily life” that Wordsworth associated with city life, especially literary life in London.

In the preface, Wordsworth characterized those forces as acting against the elevation of mind in which the poet specializes, and he identified them with urban life: For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature of the atrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespear and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagent stories in verse.” In a letter to Catherine Clarkson years later (4 June 1812), Wordsworth blamed not social institutions but people themselves for the ills of society: “As to public affairs; they are most alarming ...

The [Prince Regent] seems neither respected or beloved; and the lower orders have been for upwards of thirty years accumulating in pestilential masses of ignorant population; the effects now begin to show themselves....” These words are remarkable in light of Wordsworth’s early identification with just such “masses of population,” though it is evident even in the preface that he had already begun to represent “the lower orders” as fundamentally removed from the affairs of both state and the arts. This belief is extraordinary considering the faith he had expressed in “the people” in “A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff.” Even before the publication of the first edition in 1798, Wordsworth was certainly aware that the poems in Lyrical Ballads were different from the conventional verse of the day, and he knew that fashionable reviewers would probably dismiss them as insufficiently elevated in tone and subject matter. They did, with a vengeance, and a good part of Wordsworth’s additions to the preface for the 1802 edition are attempts to answer his critics.

But even in the 1800 version of the preface Wordsworth made an explicit connection between a plain poetic diction and a proper relationship to nature and society; that is, he makes the issue of a poetic diction a moral one, and his critique of a sonnet by Thomas Gray is an ethical demonstration as well as an example of literary criticism directed by one generation against the preceding one. As Wordsworth revised the preface for later editions, the changes reflected Wordsworth’s increasingly conservative and establishment views. By December 1799 William and Dorothy Wordsworth were living in Dove Cottage, at Town End, Grasmere. In May 1802 Sir James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, died, and, though the litigation over his debt to the estate of Wordsworth’s father had not been settled, his heir, Sir William Lowther, agreed to pay the Wordsworth children the entire sum. With financial prospects, Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson on 2 October 1802. The settlement helped to support a growing family and also allowed the Wordsworths to continue their generosity to various friends and men of letters, many of whom came to stay at Dove Cottage, sometimes for months on end.

The death of the earl of Lonsdale also marked the beginning of a close economic and political relationship between William Wordsworth and Sir William Lowther (who became earl of Lonsdale in 1807) that would have a significant effect on the poet’s political philosophy in the years to come. Wordsworth continued to write poetry with energy and passion over the next several years, and while fashionable critics such as Francis Jeffrey continued to snipe, his reputation and finances slowly improved. During these years he composed “The Solitary Reaper,” “Resolution and Independence,” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” perhaps the greatest lyrics of his maturity. In these poems Wordsworth presents a fully developed, yet morally flexible, picture of the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Influenced by Neoplatonism, these poems also prepare the way for Wordsworth’s return to conventional religious belief. In 1805 Wordsworth completed a massive revision of the “poem to Coleridge” that would be published, after undergoing periodic adjustment and revision, after the poet’s death in 1850.

Many critics believe that the “1805 Prelude,” as it has come to be called, is Wordsworth’s greatest poetic achievement. In May 1808, his “great decade” behind him, Wordsworth moved with his family to Allan Bank, a larger house in Grasmere. Thomas De Quincy took over Dove Cottage. Evidence of a decisive turn in Wordsworth’s social and political views—and, by extension, his poetical views as well—during this period is to be found in The Convention of Cintra (1809), an extended political tract concerning the British expedition to Portugal to fight against Napoleon’s forces encamped on the Spanish peninsula.

In 1793 Wordsworth had written in his “Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff,” “In France royalty is no more.” In 1808 he might have said “In William Wordsworth, Jacobinism is no more.” In place of Wordsworth’s early belief in equality, The Convention of Cintra presents a narrowly patriotic and nationalist view of European politics and a profoundly reactionary political philosophy expressed in tortured rhetoric: But, from the moment of the rising of the people of the Pyrenean peninsula, there was a mighty change; we were instantaneously animated; and, from that moment, the contest assumed the dignity, which it is not in the power of any thing but hope to bestow; and, if I may dare to transfer language, prompted by a revelation of the state of being that admits not of decay or change, to the concerns and interests of our transitory planet, from that moment “this corruptible put on incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality.” The rest of Wordsworth’s peroration is similarly tangled in syntax and thought.

Furthermore, Wordsworth seems to have retreated into a form of rationalism he had rejected in order to become the great poet of 1797-1807: Never, indeed, was the fellowship of our sentient nature more intimately felt—never was the irresistible power of justice more gloriously displayed than when the British and Spanish Nations, with an impulse like that of two ancient heros throwing down their weapons and reconciled in the field, ... embraced each other—to solemnize this conversion of love, not by festivities of peace, but by combating side by side through danger and under affliction in the devotedness of perfect brotherhood. This was a conjunction which excited hope as fervent as it was rational. Throughout The Convention of Cintra Wordsworth seems to have given himself over to rigid abstractions such as Patriotism, Justice, and Power, and it is possible to argue that the diminution of Wordsworth’s poetic power dates from this period. If “A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” was derivative of Godwin, The Convention of Cintra is certainly derivative of Edmund Burke.

When Henry Crabb Robinson showed a copy of Wordsworth’s pamphlet to Thomas Quayle, Quayle said that Wordsworth’s style resembled the worst of Burke’s. The radical republican of 1793 has by this point adopted not only Burke’s style but the essence of his thought as well. The transformation of his ideas seems to have cost Wordsworth his clarity of language, so apparent in “A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff,” and even the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” which, though structurally complicated, is never obscure in the way of The Convention of Cintra. In spite of his claim that he wrote “so few letters, and employ my pen so little in any way,” Wordsworth was a prolific correspondent throughout his life, and his letters provide a useful prose fabric upon which to trace the embroidery of the poems. One brief sequence of letters from 1811 and 1812 illustrates Wordsworth’s range of tone and subject in this literary subgenre. Writing on 28 March 1811 to C. W.

Pasley, who had sent Wordsworth a copy of his Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (1810), Wordsworth said how much he enjoyed the book, which he had “expected with great impatience,” and remarked that having read it carefully, he considered himself “in a high degree instructed” by the volume. Then the theorist of The Convention of Cintra began a critique of Pasley’s book, which according to Wordsworth is overly pessimistic about Britain’s chances for defeating France and overly belligerent in suggesting that the English must launch an all-out war of conquest, beginning in Sicily, on the European continent, planting the seeds of justice wherever the armies are successful. Wordsworth, whose life had taught him to be economically astute, saw the folly of such an expedition, and told Pasley so, in exquisite detail. In fact, one is able to gain a clearer appreciation of Wordsworth’s later political thinking from this and other letters of the period than from The Convention of Cintra with its overblown rhetoric. The letter to Pasley has the considerable virtue, for the sake of Wordsworth’s prose, that it is rooted in the specifics of replying to an actual text.

The letter to Pasley still, however, exhibits the poet’s lamentable willingness to subscribe to the clichés of nationalism: “Was there ever an instance, since the world began, of the peaceful arts thriving under a despotism so oppressive as that of France is and must continue to be, and among a people so unsettled, so depraved, and so undisciplined in civil arts and habits as the French nation must now be?” In his youth, Wordsworth, while an enthusiast of the French Revolution, had the analytic ability of a historian; by 1811 he had only the empty categories of a pedant. His idealism, adopted for the purposes of poetic composition, led him to sweeping political conclusions unfounded in reality: “The mind of the Country [England] is so far before that of France, and that that mind has empowered the hands of the country to raise so much national wealth, that France must condescend to accept from us what she will be unable herself to produce” [emphasis in original]. Wordsworth argued that Pasley’s scheme is unnecessary because the mind and hands of England would produce the economic defeat of the French.

There is, as has been noted, considerable economic acumen in this letter, though the commonsense insights are continually undercut by the rhetoric in which they are couched. Another side of Wordsworth is revealed in a 6 February 1812 letter to the early of Lonsdale: “I regret that it is not in my power to wait upon you personally; as the experience which. I have had of your Lordship’s gracious manners would have rendered quite pleasing to me the delicate task, which, through the means of a Letter, I am undertaking not without some reluctance.” Wordsworth’s self-consciousness clings to every word, as well it might—he was asking that Lord Lonsdale consider appointing him to “any Office [that] should be at your Lordship’s disposal (the duties of which would not call so largely upon my exertions as to prevent me from giving a considerable portion of my time to study)....” Though he had to wait more than a year, in 1813 Wordsworth was appointed, under Lonsdale’s patronage, to the post of Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland and Penrith.

On Wednesday evening, 2 December 1812, William Wordsworth wrote to his friend Robert Southey about the death of Thomas Wordsworth, the poet’s six-year-old son, the previous day. The simplicity and directness of this letter communicate Wordsworth’s sorrow with great power and integrity: Symptoms of the measles appeared upon my Son Thomas last Thursday; he was most favorable held till Tuesday, between ten and eleven at that hour was particularly lightsome and comfortable; without any assignable cause a sudden change took place, an inflammation had commenced on the lungs which it was impossible to check and the sweet Innocent yielded up his soul to God before six in the evening. He did not appear to suffer much in body, but I fear something in mind as he was of an age to have thought much upon death a subject to which his mind was daily led by the grave of his Sister. Thomas was the second child of William and Mary Wordsworth to die in childhood. Catherine had died the previous June, a few months before her fourth birthday. In late 1812 Lord Lonsdale proposed that he provide one hundred pounds a year for the support of Wordsworth and his family until a salaried position became available.

Wordsworth was at first somewhat reluctant to accept the patronage, but he accepted, and on 8 January 1813 he wrote to acknowledge receipt of payment. He was relieved when the post of Distributor of Stamps was offered to him a few months later. With this assurance of economic security, the Wordsworths moved to Rydal Mount, the poet’s final home, in May 1813. Lonsdale’s gift and patronage marked a deepening of the relations between the aristocratic earl and the formerly radical republican and supporter of revolution in France and democracy in England. Politically, Wordsworth had completely transformed himself; poetically, he repeated earlier formulas and began rearranging his poems in a seemingly infinite sequence of thematically organized volumes. Other than letters and miscellaneous notes, Wordsworth’s political prose writings conclude with Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland (1818). These have been described by one critic as “nearly unreadable,” but they are crucial to an understanding of Wordsworth’s entanglement in local and national politics. As Distributor of Stamps, Wordsworth should not have engaged in electioneering, but his two addresses back the local nobility in no uncertain terms.

By this time, Wordsworth had come to believe that the only way to preserve the virtues celebrated in “Michael” and other early poems was to maintain the traditional social orders of English society. Fully the Tory mouthpiece, Wordsworth argued that the Whigs had put too much faith in human nature, as they (and he) did at the commencement of the French Revolution. The Two Addresses praise Edmund Burke for just those values Wordsworth had earlier excoriated. By this time Wordsworth had fully incorporated Burke’s system of beliefs into his own, and several passages of the 1850 Prelude are redolent with Burkean sentimental and political philosophy. Wordsworth’s last major work in prose represents a return to his earliest interest in the land and scenery of the English Lake District. In 1810 artist Joseph Wilkinson published Select Views in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire , with an introduction by Wordsworth. In 1822 Wordsworth returned to his introduction, expanding it into a book most commonly known as A Guide through the District of the Lakes, which continues to be republished in a variety of editions.

Wordsworth’s love of his native region is evident in the Guide, which remains useful for the reader of Wordsworth’s poetry as well as for the tourist of the Lake District. Samuel Taylor Coleridge died in 1834, and, though the men had grown apart, Wordsworth continued to pay particular attention to Coleridge’s erratic first son, Hartley, a minor poet and biographer who haunted the Lake District on “pot house wanderings,” to use Wordsworth’s memorable phrase. Hartley, the child addressed in Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Wordsworth’s “To H.C. Six Years Old,” as well as the basis for the child represented in the Immortality Ode, was a feckless figure beloved by the local farmers, and Wordsworth took a special interest in seeing to his welfare. Hartley died in 1849, only a few months before Wordsworth, who instructed that his friend’s son be buried in the Wordsworth plot in Grasmere Churchyard. “He would have wished it,” said Wordsworth. In 1843 Wordsworth was named poet laureate of England, though by this time he had for the most part quit composing verse.

He revised and rearranged his poems, published various editions, and entertained literary guests and friends. When he died in 1850 he had for some years been venerated as a sage, his most ardent detractors glossing over the radical origins of his poetics and politics. Wordsworth’s prose, while not extensive and often difficult, reveals the poet’s historical context. A careful reading of Wordsworth’s prose will lead, perhaps, to a clearer understanding of the path he traveled from the eighteenth century to the Victorian age, and modern readers will recognized the origins of their own literary and political culture. WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR: BOOKS An Evening Walk. An Epistle; in verse. Addressed to a young Lady, from the Lakes of the North of England (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1793). Descriptive Sketches. In Verse. Taken during a Pedestrian Tour in the Italian, Grison, Swiss, and Savoyard Alps (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1793). Lyrical Ballads, with a few Other Poems, by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Bristol: Printed by Biggs & Cottle for T.

N. Longman, London, 1798; London: Printed for J. & A. Arch, 1798; revised and enlarged edition, 2 volumes, London: Printed for T. N. Longman & O. Rees by Biggs & Co., Bristol, 1800; revised again, London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1802; Philadelphia: Printed & sold by James Humphreys, 1802). Poems, in two Volumes (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1807). Concerning The Relations of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal to Each Other, and to the Common Enemy, at this Crisis; and Specifically as Affected by the Convention of Cintra (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1809). The Excursion, being a portion of The Recluse, a Poem (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1814; New York: C. & S. Francis, 1849).

Poems By William Wordsworth, Including Lyrical Ballads, and the Miscellaneous Pieces of the Author, 2 volumes (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1815). The White Doe of Rylstone: or The Fate of the Nortons. A Poem (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown by James Ballantyne, Edinburgh, 1815). Thanksgiving Ode, January 18, 1816. With Other Short Pieces, Chiefly referring to Recent Public Events (London: Printed by Thomas Davison for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1816). A Letter to A Friend of Robert Burns (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1816). Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland (Kendal: Printed by Airey & Bellingham, 1818).

Peter Bell, A Tale in Verse (London: Printed by Strahan & Spottiswoode for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1819). The Waggoner, A Poem. To Which are added, Sonnets (London: Printed by Strahan & Spottiswoode for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1819). Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth, 4 volumes (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1820). The River Duddon, A series of Sonnets: Vaudracour and Julia: and Other Poems. To which is annexed, A Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes, in the North of England (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1820). A Description of the Scenery of the Lakes in The North of England.

Third Edition, (Now first published separately) (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1822; revised and enlarged, 1823); revised and enlarged again as A Guide through the District of the Lakes in The North of England (Kendal: Published by Hudson & Nicholson / London: Longman & Co., Moxon, and Whitaker & Co., 1835). Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1820 (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1822). Ecclesiastical Sketches (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1822). The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 4 volumes (Boston: Published by Cummings & Hilliard, printed by Hilliard & Metcalf, 1824).

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (5 volumes, London: Printed for Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1827; revised edition, 4 volumes, London: Printed for Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1832). The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth [pirated edition] (Paris: A. & W. Galignani, 1828). Selections from the Poems of William Wordsworth, Esq. Chiefly for the Use of Schools and Young Persons, edited by Joseph Hine (London: Moxon, 1831). Yarrow Revisited, And Other Poems (London: Printed for Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman and Edward Moxon, 1835; Boston: J. Monroe & Co, 1835; New York: R. Bartlett & S. Raynor, 1835).

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (6 volumes, London: Moxon, 1836, 1837; enlarged, 7 volumes, 1842; enlarged again, 8 volumes, 1851). The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, edited by Henry Reed (Philadelphia: J. Kay, Jun., and Brother / Boston: J. Munroe, 1837). The Sonnets of William Wordsworth (London: Edward Moxon, 1838). Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years; Including The Borderers, A Tragedy (London: Edward Moxon, 1842). Kendal and Windermere Railway. Two Letters Reprinted from The Morning Post. Revised, with Additions (Kendal: Printed by Branthwaite & Son, 1845; London: Whittaker & Co. and Edward Moxon / Kendal: R. Branthwaite & Son, 1845). The Poems of William Wordsworth, D.C.L., Poet Laureate (London: Moxon, 1845).

The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, D.C.L., Poet Laureate, 6 volumes (London: Moxon, 1849, 1850). The Prelude, Or Growth of a Poet's Mind, An Autobiographical Poem (London: Moxon, 1850; New York: D. Appleton / Philadelphia: Geo. S. Appleton, 1850). The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, edited by Reverend Alexander B. Grosart (London: Moxon, 1876; facsimile, New York: AMS Press, 1967). The Recluse ["Home at Grasmere"] (London & New York: Macmillan, 1888). Editions BBC - History - Historic Figures: William Wordsworth (1770-1850) z William Wordsworth, c. 1840 © Wordsworth was one of the most influential of England's Romantic poets. William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 at Cockermouth in Cumbria. His father was a lawyer.

Both Wordsworth's parents died before he was 15, and he and his four siblings were left in the care of different relatives. As a young man, Wordsworth developed a love of nature, a theme reflected in many of his poems. While studying at Cambridge University, Wordsworth spent a summer holiday on a walking tour in Switzerland and France. He became an enthusiast for the ideals of the French Revolution. He began to write poetry while he was at school, but none was published until 1793. In 1795, Wordsworth received a legacy from a close relative and he and his sister Dorothy went to live in Dorset. Two years later they moved again, this time to Somerset, to live near the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was an admirer of Wordsworth's work. They collaborated on 'Lyrical Ballads', published in 1798. This collection of poems, mostly by Wordsworth but with Coleridge contributing 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', is generally taken to mark the beginning of the Romantic movement in English poetry. The poems were greeted with hostility by most critics.

In 1799, after a visit to Germany with Coleridge, Wordsworth and Dorothy settled at Dove Cottage in Grasmere in the Lake District. Coleridge lived nearby with his family. Wordsworth's most famous poem, 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' was written at Dove Cottage in 1804. In 1802, Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. The next few years were personally difficult for Wordsworth. Two of his children died, his brother was drowned at sea and Dorothy suffered a mental breakdown. His political views underwent a transformation around the turn of the century, and he became increasingly conservative, disillusioned by events in France culminating in Napoleon Bonaparte taking power. In 1813, Wordsworth moved from Grasmere to nearby Ambelside. He continued to write poetry, but it was never as great as his early works. After 1835, he wrote little more. In 1842, he was given a government pension and the following year became poet laureate. Wordsworth died on 23 April 1850 and was buried in Grasmere churchyard.

His great autobiographical poem, 'The Prelude', which he had worked on since 1798, was published after his death. William Wordsworth Family William Wordsworth Family Mother: Ann Cookson Wordsworth (1748-1778) Brother: Richard Wordsworth (1768-1816) Daughter: Dorothy "Dora" Wordsworth Quillinan (1804-1847) Son: Thomas Wordsworth (1806-1812) © 2017 Shmoop University. All rights reserved. Logging out… You've been inactive for a while, logging you out in a few seconds... I'm Still Here! William Wordsworth: Childhood William Wordsworth NEXT William Wordsworth was born 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, England, a village in the northwest county of Cumberland. He was the second of five children born to John and Ann Cookson Wordsworth. His sister Dorothy was born in 1771. The two siblings were baptized together, which marked the beginning of a lifelong closeness. From childhood, William Wordsworth was unusually intense.

When he was seven years old, his mother told a friend that the only one of her children "about whose future life she was anxious, was William; and he, she said, would be remarkable for either good or evil." 4 Yikes. For someone who grew up to romanticize childhood, Wordsworth did not have a particularly happy one. His mother died when he was eight. His father worked as a lawyer to the Earl of Lowther, a notoriously corrupt man who had earned the local nickname "Wicked Jimmy." When John Wordsworth died in 1783, leaving thirteen-year old William and his four siblings orphans, the family discovered that the Earl owed their father a large sum of money, and as a result they were left deeply in debt. They sued but were unable to claim any money until the Earl died twenty years later. The siblings were forced to scatter among relatives. Dorothy was sent off to relatives in Yorkshire while William stayed with his mother's clan in Penrith, Cumberland. The siblings did not see each other again for nine years. William Wordsworth did not get along with his mother's family and was very unhappy in Penrith.

Rather than stay at home with them, he occupied himself on long walks through the beautiful rugged hills of northwest England. For the rest of his life, nature would be a source of inspiration and comfort. It was also a crucial part of his work. "Poetry is the image of man and nature," he wrote in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. A poet "considers man and nature as essentially adapted to each other, and the mind of man as naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting properties of nature." 5 His family eventually sent him to school in the Lake District , a gorgeous corner in northwest England known for its picturesque landscapes. Wordsworth would make his home there for most of his life. In 1787, he entered St. John's College at Cambridge University . He also made his publishing debut as a published writer that year, with a sonnet in The European Magazine . On school holidays, Wordsworth set out on foot for long walking tours of Europe.

Question: What was the name of William Wordsworth's sister?
Answer: Dorothy