Pioneer Romantic poet - William Wordsworth

Born on April 7th 1770 in Cockermouth, England, William Wordsworth was one of the leading English romantic poets at his time. Second of five children of John Wordsworth, William was close to his sister, poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, all his life. But they got separated and didn't meet again for nine years after their mothers' death.

In 1783 his father died as well. Although his childhood was generally depicted as positive, it took him years and much writing to get over his parent's death and the separation from his siblings.

In 1790, he visited Revolutionary France and supported the Republican movement. He fell in love with Annette Vallon, a French woman, who gave birth to their child in 1792, named Caroline.

Due to financial problems and Britain's tension with France, he returned to England alone the next year. The reign of terror prevented him from having anything to do with the Republican movement, and the war between France and Britain hindered him from seeing Annette and Caroline again for many years. Wordsworth was believed to have been depressed and emotionally unsettled in the mid 1790s.

His acclaimed "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," was written in retrospect of his seaside walk with his daughter, whom he had not seen for ten years and at the conception of this poem he has not yet seen his daughter. This poem expresses his love for both mother and daughter, contrary to beliefs of the general public at the time.

While he was influenced by poets like John Milton, Samuel Coleridge, John Stewart and William Shakespeare; great poets such as Wilfred Owen, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and W.B. Yeats were inspired by him.

Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until he died in 1850. An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketche were his first collections of poetry which came to print in 1793. The same year he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

His Lyrical Ballads, 1798, a joint publication with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and certain insights from Dorothy his sister, was an important work in the English romantic movement. Neither of their names were mentioned in the volume as author!

The second edition, in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as author. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth refers to "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recollected in tranquillity."

Wordsworth hated the poetry of Alexander Pope, believing that it was the complete opposite of his own. He vehemently refused to accept that Pope's work was poetry at all.

Later on he moved to Germany accompanied by Dorothy and Coleridge where he concentrated on The Prelude. An autobiography in itself it is considered to be his best work. It was published post humous and only the title was given after his death.

Afterwards he and his sister moved back to England where he and Coleridge met Robert Southey. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey came to be known as the "Lake Poets".

During this period the themes of his poems became death, endurance, separation and grief. After receiving the inheritance left by his father in 1783, he married a childhood friend Mary Hutchinson. He had five children and died on 23rd April, 1850 in Ambleside, England at the age of 80.