William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was a Cumberland lawyer’s son who walked through revolutionary France, fathered a daughter there, and returned to write, with Coleridge, the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 that began English Romanticism, with its Preface on the language of common men and poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity. The Poems of 1807 contain the Immortality Ode and the sonnets; The Prelude, the autobiography of his own mind, was published after his death. He lived at Grasmere and Rydal with his sister Dorothy, grew conservative, became Poet Laureate at seventy-three, and outlived the poets who had mocked him.