An overview and discussion on the life of William Wordsworth

Born in 1770 and passed on in 1850, Wordsworth must have had a fruitful life, right?

William Wordsworth was born on the 7th of April in 1770 in the Lake District of northern England, and happened to be one of the leading poets of English Romanticism along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He is regarded as one of the ‘Lake Poets’. These poets were called so due to their associations with the Lake District in Cumbria, Northern England.

As a child, he was sent to Esthwaite Water with his brothers to be raised by a Quaker, Dame Tyson, after his mother died. The Vale of Esthwaite was among hills and a lake. He is said to have really enjoyed his childhood, a time when I “breathed with joy”. In 1787 he entered St. John’s College in Cambridge, being prepared in the maths and sciences above his peers. Wordsworth devoted his summer break in 1790 to a long walking tour through revolutionary France. Upon taking his Cambridge degree, he returned in 1791 to France, where he met his partner, a French named Annette Vallon. However, before their child was born in December 1792, Wordsworth returned to England and was cut off there by the outbreak of war between England and France. Until his daughter, Caroline, was nine, he was unable to meet her.

After returning to England from France, Wordsworth had to go through a dark moment in his life, as he was unprepared for any work, had no connections, no money and extremely hostile to England’s opposition to France, he lived in London with some radicals, and began to feel sympathy for society’s lower classes and the victims of the war. Fortunately, this dark period ended in 1795, when Wordsworth was reunited with his beloved sister Dorothy.

They had to undergo financial strains and hardships together. In the year 1795, Wordsworth and Dorothy became friends with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another poet famous in the Romantic period. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge made the Lyrical Ballads (1798), a famous collection of poetry as a hallmark for the Romantic era.

In December 1798 they were stuck in the remote town of Goslar, in Saxony, under the Harz mountains, in extreme cold and in physical and cultural isolation, surrounded by a people alien to them. Dotted with palaces and castles, Saxony is a state in eastern Germany. Some palaces and castles date back to the Middle Ages. On the Elbe River, the capital city, Dresden, is known for historic buildings rebuilt after WWII. In December 1799 they moved into Dove Cottage, which became a great home for the siblings for the next eight years. The days spent in Dove Cottage near Grasmere were of walking the wooded paths and composing poems for William Wordsworth and letters and journals for Dorothy Wordsworth.

In 1808 Wordsworth and his family moved from Dove Cottage to larger quarters in Grasmere. Wordsworth spent the remainder of his life at Rydal Mount, near Ambleside. Wordsworth was “tinkering” with his poems during his last years, as noticed by his family, his persistent habit of revising his earlier poems through edition after edition.

Wordsworth died on the 23rd of April in 1850, at the age of 80 after a long fulfilling life, forever to be remembered as one of the greatest Romantic poets in English history.