William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).

Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, before which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's poet laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850.

The year 1793 saw the first publication of poems by Wordsworth, in the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. In 1795 he received a legacy of 900 pounds from Raisley Calvert and became able to pursue a career as a poet.

It was also in 1795 that he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. Together Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement.

Between 1795-97, Wordsworth wrote his only play, The Borderers, a verse tragedy set during the reign of King Henry III of England, when Englishmen in the North Country came into conflict with Scottish rovers. He attempted to get the play staged in November 1797, but it was rejected by Thomas Harris, the manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, who proclaimed it "impossible that the play should succeed in the representation". The rebuff was not received lightly by Wordsworth and the play was not published until 1842, after substantial revision.

In 1814 Wordsworth published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part work The Recluse, even though he had not completed the first part or the third part, and never did. 

Major works

• Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798)
  • "Simon Lee"
  • "We are Seven"
  • "Lines Written in Early Spring"
  • "Expostulation and Reply"
  • "The Tables Turned"
  • "The Thorn"
  • "Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"
• Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800)
  • Preface to the Lyrical Ballads
  • "Strange fits of passion have I known"
  • "She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways"
  • "Three years she grew"
  • "A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal"
  • "I travelled among unknown men"
  • "Lucy Gray"
  • "The Two April Mornings"
  • "Solitary Reaper"
  • "Nutting"
  • "The Ruined Cottage"
  • "Michael"
  • "The Kitten At Play"
• Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
  • "Resolution and Independence"
  • "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Also known as "Daffodils"
  • "My Heart Leaps Up"
  • "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
  • "Ode to Duty"
  • "The Solitary Reaper"
  • "Elegiac Stanzas"
  • "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"
  • "London, 1802"
  • "The World Is Too Much with Us"
• Guide to the Lakes (1810)
• " To the Cuckoo "
• The Excursion (1814)
• Laodamia (1815, 1845)
• The White Doe of Rylstone (1815)
• Peter Bell (1819)
• The Prelude (1850)