biography of william wordsworth pdf

• William Wordsworth

Interviews and Recollections

• © 2005
• Harold Orel (University Professor Emeritus) 0

English Department, University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA

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Part of the book series: Interviews and Recollections (IR)

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Table of contents (19 chapters)

Front matter, samuel taylor coleridge (1772–1834).

Harold Orel

Charles Lamb (1775–1834)

Thomas de quincey (1785–1859), william hazlitt (1778–1830), james henry leigh hunt (1784–1859), robert southey (1774–1843), john keats (1795–1821), sir walter scott (1771–1832), john hamilton reynolds (1794–1852), alfred, lord tennyson (1809–92), john stuart mill (1806–73), walter savage landor (1775–1864), robert browning (1812–89), aubrey thomas de vere (1814–1902), benjamin robert haydon (1786–1846), henry crabb robinson (1775–1867), matthew arnold (1822–88), ralph waldo emerson (1803–82), more opinions.

• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• British and Irish Literature

About this book

Editors and affiliations, about the editor, bibliographic information.

Book Title : William Wordsworth

Book Subtitle : Interviews and Recollections

Editors : Harold Orel

Series Title : Interviews and Recollections

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230501904

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan London

eBook Packages : Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts Collection , Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

Copyright Information : Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2005

Hardcover ISBN : 978-1-4039-3962-3 Published: 16 December 2005

Softcover ISBN : 978-1-349-52003-9 Published: 01 January 2005

eBook ISBN : 978-0-230-50190-4 Published: 16 December 2005

Series ISSN : 2947-1621

Series E-ISSN : 2947-163X

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XII, 199

Topics : British and Irish Literature , Nineteenth-Century Literature , Poetry and Poetics

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The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth

Richard Gravil is author of Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities 1776–1862 (2000) and of two holistic studies of Wordsworth, Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 (2003) and Wordsworth's Variety (forthcoming). He was the founding co-editor, with Chris Gair, of Symbiosis: a Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations. As founder and commissioning editor of Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, he is responsible for digitizing the Owen and Smyser Prose Works of William Wordsworth (2008/2009). On behalf of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation, of which he is also a Trustee, he organizes the Wordsworth Summer Conference and the Wordsworth Winter School. His editorial work includes Coleridge's Imagination (1985 and 2007) with Nicholas Roe and Lucy Newlyn; The Coleridge Connection (1990), with Molly Lefebure; Master Narratives (2001) and The Republic of Poetry: Transatlantic Continuities from Bradstreet to Plath (a special issue of Symbiosis, 2003).

Daniel Robinson is Professor of English at Widener University. He co-edited A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, 1750–1850 (1999), with Paula Feldman, and Lyrical Ballads and Related Writings (2001) with William Richey. He is the editor of Poems, The Works of Mary Robinson (2 vols., 2009) and author of Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing (2014), William Wordsworth’s Poetry: A Reader’s Guide (2010) and The Poetry of Mary Robinson: Form and Fame (2011). His work has appeared in The Wordsworth Circle, Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Grasmere 2011, and Grasmere 2013.

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The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-eight essays, by an international team of scholar-critics, to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth’s life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. Nineteen essays on the exceptional variety of his poetry explore systematically the highlights of a long career, giving special prominence to the lyric Wordsworth of Lyrical Ballads and the Poems, in Two Volumes, and the blank verse poet of ‘The Recluse’. Most of the other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet, including his friendships and networks, and his critical and political prose. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth’s life, career and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of ‘The Recluse’; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture through his intellectual legacy in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception—most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship. It offers the fullest treatment of Wordsworth’s poetic career imaginable in a single volume.

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William Wordsworth

(1770-1850)

Who Was William Wordsworth?

Poet William Wordsworth worked with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads (1798). The collection, which contained Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," introduced Romanticism to English poetry. Wordsworth also showed his affinity for nature with the famous poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud." He became England's poet laureate in 1843, a role he held until his death in 1850.

Poet William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Wordsworth’s mother died when he was 7, and he was an orphan at 13. Despite these losses, he did well at Hawkshead Grammar School — where he wrote his first poetry — and went on to study at Cambridge University. He did not excel there, but managed to graduate in 1791.

Wordsworth had visited France in 1790 — in the midst of the French Revolution — and was a supporter of the new government’s republican ideals. On a return trip to France the next year, he fell in love with Annette Vallon, who became pregnant. However, the declaration of war between England and France in 1793 separated the two. Left adrift and without income in England, Wordsworth was influenced by radicals such as William Godwin.

In 1795, Wordsworth received an inheritance that allowed him to live with his sister, Dorothy. That same year, Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The two became friends, and together worked on Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume contained poems such as Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," and helped Romanticism take hold in English poetry.

The same year that Lyrical Ballads was published, Wordsworth began writing The Prelude , an epic autobiographical poem that he would revise throughout his life (it was published posthumously in 1850). While working on The Prelud e, Wordsworth produced other poetry, such as "Lucy." He also wrote a preface for the second edition of Lyrical Ballads ; it described his poetry as being inspired by powerful emotions and would come to be seen as a declaration of Romantic principles.

"Though nothing can bring back the hour, Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower." -- from Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

In 1802, a temporary lull in fighting between England and France meant that Wordsworth was able to see Vallon and their daughter, Caroline. After returning to England, he wed Mary Hutchinson, who gave birth to the first of their five children in 1803. Wordsworth was also still writing poetry, including the famous "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" and "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." These pieces were published in another Wordsworth collection, Poems, in Two Volumes (1807).

Evolving Poetry and Philosophy

As he grew older, Wordsworth began to reject radicalism. In 1813, he was named as a distributor of stamps and moved his family to a new home in the Lake District. By 1818, Wordsworth was an ardent supporter of the conservative Tories.

Though Wordsworth continued to produce poetry — including moving work that mourned the deaths of two of his children in 1812 — he had reached a zenith of creativity between 1798 and 1808. It was this early work that cemented his reputation as an acclaimed literary figure.

In 1843, Wordsworth became England's poet laureate, a position he held for the rest of his life. At the age of 80, he died on April 23, 1850, at his home in Rydal Mount, Westmorland, England.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: William Wordsworth
• Birth Year: 1770
• Birth date: April 7, 1770
• Birth City: Cockermouth, Cumberland, England
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: At the end of the 18th century, poet William Wordsworth helped found the Romantic movement in English literature. He also wrote "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Aries
• Cambridge University
• Death Year: 1850
• Death date: April 23, 1850
• Death City: Rydal Mount, Westmorland, England
• Death Country: United Kingdom

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: William Wordsworth Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/william-wordsworth
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 27, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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Biography Online

William Wordsworth Biography

Early life – William Wordsworth

Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, in north-west England. His father, John Wordsworth, introduced the young William to the great poetry of Milton and Shakespeare , but he was frequently absent during William’s childhood. Instead, Wordsworth was brought up by his mother’s parents in Penrith, but this was not a happy period. He frequently felt in conflict with his relations and at times contemplated ending his life. However, as a child, he developed a great love of nature, spending many hours walking in the fells of the Lake District. He also became very close to his sister, Dorothy, who would later become a poet in her own right.

In 1778, William was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire; this separated him from his beloved sister for nearly nine years. In 1787, he entered St. John’s College, Cambridge. It was in this year that he had his first published work, a sonnet in the European Magazine . While still a student at Cambridge, in 1790, he travelled to revolutionary France. He was deeply impressed by the revolutionary spirit and the principles of liberty and egalite. He also fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon; together they had an illegitimate daughter, Anne Caroline.

Friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge

After graduating, Wordsworth was fortunate to receive a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert to pursue a career in literature. He was able to publish his first collection of poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches . That year he was also to meet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. They became close friends and collaborated on poetic ideas. They later published a joint work – Lyrical Ballards (1798), and Wordsworth greatest work ‘ The Prelude ‘ was initially called by Wordsworth ‘ To Coleridge ‘

This period was important for Wordsworth and also the direction of English poetry. With Coleridge , Keats and Shelley , Wordsworth helped create a much more spontaneous and emotional poetry. It sought to depict the beauty of nature and the quintessential depth of human emotion. In the preface to Lyrical Ballards , Wordsworth writes of poetry:

“The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Lyrical Ballards includes some of his best-known poems, such as, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, “A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal”.

A SLUMBER did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.

– W. Wordsworth 1799.

In 1802, after returning from a brief visit to see his daughter, Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy continued to live with the couple, and she became close to Mary as well as her brother. William and Mary had five children, though three died early.

Lake District, North Windermere, near Grasmere.

In 1807, he published another important volume of poetry “ Poems, in Two Volumes “, this included famous poems such as; “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, “My Heart Leaps Up”, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.”

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils;

– W. Wordsworth – I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

In 1813, he received an appointment as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland; this annual income of £400 gave him greater financial security and enabled him to devote his spare time to poetry. In 1813, he family also moved into Rydal Mount, Grasmere; a picturesque location, which inspired his later poetry.

“My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die!”

Poet Laureate

By the 1820s, the critical acclaim for Wordsworth was growing, though ironically critics note that, from this period, his poetry began losing some of its vigour and emotional intensity. His poetry was perhaps a reflection of his own ideas. The 1790s had been a period of emotional turmoil and faith in the revolutionary ideal. Towards the end of his life, his disillusionment with the French Revolution had made him more conservative in outlook. In 1839 he received an honorary degree from Oxford University and received a civil pension of £300 a year from the government. In 1843, he was persuaded to become the nation’s Poet Laureate, despite saying he wouldn’t write any poetry as Poet Laureate. Wordsworth is the only Poet Laureate who never wrote poetry during his official time in the job.

Wordsworth died of pleurisy on 23 April 1850. He was buried in St Oswald’s Church Grasmere. After his death, his widow Mary published his autobiographical ‘Poem to Coleridge’ under the title “The Prelude”.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of William Wordsworth” , Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net , 22nd Jan. 2010. Last updated 6th March 2018

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