His father was a lawyer. Both Wordsworth's parents died before he was 15, and he and his four siblings were left in the care of different relatives. As a young man, Wordsworth developed a love of nature, a theme reflected in many of his poems. While studying at Cambridge University, Wordsworth spent a summer holiday on a walking tour in Switzerland and France.
He became an enthusiast for the ideals of the French Revolution. He began to write poetry while he was at school, but none was published until In , Wordsworth received a legacy from a close relative and he and his sister Dorothy went to live in Dorset. Two years later they moved again, this time to Somerset, to live near the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was an admirer of Wordsworth's work.
Scott-Kilvert , , To Byron everything about the poem—its opulent format, the dedication to Lord Lonsdale , its metaphysical pretensions—indicated that its author had become a social and intellectual lackey. The influence of The Excursion on Shelley , however, was not inconsiderable, and Keats deemed it one of the ' three things to rejoice at in this Age ' letter of 10 Jan ; The Letters of John Keats, — , ed.
Rollins , 2 vols. Slowly the positive assessment of Wordsworth's achievement took hold. For years his remained a coterie reputation, but after it grew steadily. London was always a lure for Wordsworth , and in an extended autumn visit was enjoyed so energetically that after a month Sara Hutchinson was hoping ' we shall go out in the evenings no more ' Letters of Sara Hutchinson , ed.
Coburn , , One evening has become famous as Benjamin Robert Haydon's ' immortal dinner '. On 28 December, Haydon , who had already brought Keats and Wordsworth together on an earlier occasion, was host in his painting-room to a party at which Charles Lamb became tipsy, and Wordsworth is said to have hesitated to join in a toast proposed by Keats , ' Newton's health and confusion to mathematics '.
Foreign travel was always a greater lure still, and in this period, with money less of a worry than it had been, Wordsworth yielded to it. In the summer of he returned to the Alps and traced exactly the ground he had walked with Robert Jones.
Dorothy Wordsworth recorded in her Journal of a Tour of the Continent, how deeply her brother was moved when he identified the track that had misled him on the Simplon Pass thirty years before. Their return route took them to Paris, and here Mary Wordsworth met Annette Vallon and Wordsworth was reunited with his daughter. In Wordsworth and Mary toured Belgium and the Netherlands; in the following year it was north Wales. In Wordsworth pursued a demanding itinerary in Ireland for five weeks.
The tour that meant most to him in this period after the Alpine excursion of , however, took place in Summoned by the ailing Sir Walter Scott to visit before he left for Italy, Wordsworth and Dora made Abbotsford the starting point for a full Scottish tour.
In Scott's company they revisited the Yarrow, and with high emotion the two men bade each other farewell. Wordsworth and Dora then followed the route of earlier Scottish excursions, and the year-old was so much invigorated that he often walked 20 miles a day. Dora was glad that their activity took her father's mind off the progress of the Reform Bill , and she had reason to be grateful, for the poet had been settling into tiresome gloom for over a decade.
After the defeat of Napoleon , Wordsworth was alert to any sign that his countrymen had not learned the lessons to be drawn from the French politics of the previous twenty-five years. In practice this meant that he became increasingly partisan. In the Westmorland election of he campaigned tirelessly to ensure victory for Lord Lonsdale's candidates, convinced that the contender, Henry Brougham , was little better than a Jacobin.
He was unsympathetic to radicals such as Cobbett and Hone , not because he thought the conduct of public affairs beyond reproach—far from it—but because he believed that activities such as theirs could only stir up unrest from below and dissolve national unity.
Wordsworth strongly opposed Catholic emancipation in and the Reform Bill of Both measures weighed on him so heavily that friends and his family became alarmed for his health. This was not quite true, but his finest work was behind him. In Wordsworth published revised versions of poems written much earlier, Peter Bell and The Waggoner , and in a sonnet sequence, The River Duddon , with other recent compositions, which was enthusiastically received.
A sonnet sequence history of the Anglican church , Ecclesiastical Sketches , followed in , and in the same year Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, Two other publishing events were more significant for Wordsworth's reputation. The first was the reissuing of The Excursion in a more portable format in What became a favourite poem for Victorian readers was issued separately many times until late in the century. The second was Wordsworth's work in on a four-volume set of collected works, which he oversaw with meticulous attention to organization and revision of texts.
Collections were issued in , , , , and —50, with reprints in many other years. For all save the last of these major new editions, each of which folded new poems into the existing classifications, Wordsworth scrutinized every line with an eye to revision, in the belief that his corpus was a self-referential and still developing whole. In Wordsworth collected his recent work in the volume Yarrow Revisited. In the latter poem Wordsworth mourns the passing of Hogg , Scott , Coleridge , Lamb , and others in verse as powerful in its economy as any he had ever written.
But the volume is not wholly backward-looking. Here, however, the more attractively humane Wordsworth is to the fore, notably in the condemnation of the spirit inspiring the new poor law of The success of Yarrow Revisited , attested by second and third editions in and , emboldened Wordsworth to gamble on changing publishers. Longmans were abandoned for Edward Moxon , whose reverence for Wordsworth allied to his attentiveness in details of business endeared him to the Wordsworth circle.
Moxon accompanied the poet to Paris in , visited him at Rydal Mount, and was his host in London. Moxon published Wordsworth's next collected edition in One of the many revisions in it was especially significant: the title-page of The Excursion no longer carried the legend ' a Portion of the Recluse '.
Over the years admirers had somewhat tactlessly asked Wordsworth when The Recluse would be completed and the poet sporadically maintained the fiction that he was preparing himself for further composition, but by he had in fact recognized what he told Ticknor a couple of years later, that ' he had undertaken something beyond his powers to accomplish ' The Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor , 2, ed.
Hillard , , That his poetic career was drawing to a close was also acknowledged in the labour Wordsworth expended on thorough revision of the autobiographical poem. Charging his family to publish it after his death, Wordsworth scrutinized every line for the preparation of a new manuscript fair copy. Wordsworth's final discrete volume of poems also engaged with the distant past.
Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years contained recent work, but its chief interest was that it included 'Guilt and Sorrow, or, Incidents upon Salisbury Plain' and his drama The Borderers , both having lain in manuscript since the late s.
Wordsworth had always vehemently opposed chronological presentation of his work. The classification system elaborated over the sequence of his collected editions had been intended to avoid what he described as the ' very worst ' way of displaying a poet's corpus 27 April ; Letters , 4.
Now, however, in an introductory note which conceded the claim of ' literary biography ', Wordsworth underscored the historical interest of what he was disclosing, as he located the origins of 'Guilt and Sorrow' in and the beginning of the war with France. What he did not reveal was that though the note recalls the poet's state of mind in that period, the poems had been substantially revised and, in the case of 'Guilt and Sorrow' especially, their radicalism muted.
Wordsworth concluded the setting of his poetic affairs in order. In , at the urging of his beloved friend Isabella Fenwick , Wordsworth composed extensive notes about the whole of his life's work, upon which all editors and biographers have drawn, and in he dictated memoranda about his early life for his nephew Christopher to use after his death in whatever form of biographical notice might seem appropriate.
In Wordsworth oversaw the publication of a handsome single-volume edition of his collected works. The text was, as usual, subjected throughout to revision, but the most significant was that to The Excursion , in which the language of Christian doctrine was more explicitly introduced.
Revision, however, what the poet's family called ' tinkering ', was not quite over. New readings in the last collection in six volumes in —50 established the text of his corpus in this, the last authorized edition of the poet's lifetime.
Wordsworth was tall for his day and proud of it. Regular walking until advanced old age kept him spare, and though he was troubled by the usual infirmities of age, Wordsworth's only serious medical worry was for his eyes, which frequently became so inflamed that he feared he would go blind.
In later life he regularly wore a shade or tinted glasses. Comments about Wordsworth in his prime tend to emphasize his robust directness, practicality, and seriousness, and there are many witnesses who also found him, as Charles Greville did in , ' very cheerful, merry, courteous, and talkative ' 25 Feb ; The Greville Memoirs: a New Edition , ed.
Reeve , 8 vols. During his middle years, however, Wordsworth often left an unappealing impression on those who did not know him intimately. Deeply wounded by professional failure, he became prickly and egotistical.
Keats was not the only one who found him domineering. From the s Wordsworth sank into such an utterly disproportionate gloom about the state of the country that eventually even his family remonstrated with him. In the late s, though his disapproval of social and political developments remained strong, he seems to have mellowed personally. Numerous portraits capture Wordsworth across the whole of his poetic life from Lyrical Ballads to the laureateship.
Wordsworth in was drawn by Robert Hancock ; the pencil and chalk portrait is now in the National Portrait Gallery. The Carruthers oil was judged a strong likeness by the Wordsworth circle, but it was the pencil and chalk Haydon , familiarly known at Rydal as ' the Brigand ', that was judged to have caught some of the fire of the reckless youth who had earlier walked across revolutionary France. Mary Wordsworth could not bear to part with it. The finest image of the poet in late life is certainly Haydon's Wordsworth on Helvellyn , now in the National Portrait Gallery.
Wordsworth is popularly associated with solitude. One of his most famous poems speaks of ' the bliss of solitude ' 'I wandered lonely as a cloud'. In The Prelude he remarks that in childhood he was taught to feel. The Prelude , , 2. But though he drew on resources nurtured in solitude, Wordsworth was not in the ordinary sense of the word a solitary man. Wordsworth's friends and acquaintances were very numerous.
The extant correspondence indicates their range, but the volumes of letters do not include many people, such as friends from school and college days, to whom Wordsworth is known from other evidence to have remained attached. To list all their names here would be neither possible nor useful. Some account of Wordsworth's friendships with more famous figures, however, will suggest how fully engaged he was in the contemporary literary, the artistic, and to some extent the political milieu.
In the s Wordsworth met many of the most important radicals such as John Thelwall and William Godwin. The diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon record the course of his volatile friendship with the poet.
William Charles Macready became a disciple, as did John Kenyon. Through the Cambridge connections of his brother Christopher Wordsworth made the acquaintance of churchmen and academics, such as William Whewell and Hugh Rose. Charles Blomfield , bishop of London, became a fast friend. In Thomas Talfourd solicited Wordsworth's aid in promoting a copyright bill, partly because of the range of connections he would be able to lobby. Wordsworth's friendship with Lord Lonsdale put him on the guest list of many of the Lake District's leading families, but in his later years the circle there he valued most was a small one that included Eliza Fletcher , of Lancrigg, Grasmere, the Arnolds , and Isabella Fenwick.
With Harriet Martineau in Ambleside, Wordsworth could never get on. My friendship is not in my power to give: this is a gift which no man can make, it is not in our power: a sound and healthy friendship is the growth of time and circumstance, it will spring up and thrive like a wildflower when these favour, and when they do not it is in vain to look for it. A small number of people stand out as those whose friendship meant a great deal to Wordsworth , irrespective of how often they met.
Robert Southey did not endear himself to Wordsworth when they were both young, but over the years Wordsworth came to value Southey's steadiness and courage in adversity. At his death, though not invited by Southey's divided family, Wordsworth made his way through driving rain to his funeral.
Charles Lamb , his preference for London streets over the Lake District mountains notwithstanding, had a special place in Wordsworth's affections from their first meeting in Wordsworth's friendship with Sir George Beaumont began with an act of patronage—the gift in of a parcel of land, mentioned above—but it was sustained until the latter's death in by mutual interests and high personal regard.
William Rowan Hamilton , who conquered Wordsworth at once in , seemed with Coleridge to be one of ' the two most wonderful men ' he had ever met R. It is not likely that Wordsworth ever called Henry Crabb Robinson wonderful, but in his later years he came to depend upon his steadfast, unostentatious support. The most important relationships of Wordsworth's life, other than that with his wife, were those with Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge. In 'Home at Grasmere' Wordsworth pays beautiful tribute to what his sister meant to him:.
Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere journals record a degree of intimacy and passion between brother and sister which alarmed Wordsworth's first scholarly biographer, William Knight , and which continues to discomfit many readers.
Dorothy shared the poet's passion for walking and for observation of natural phenomena, and some of Wordsworth's verse draws on his sister's journal entries. One of the early bonds between Wordsworth and Coleridge was that the latter was completely enthralled by Wordsworth's ' exquisite Sister ' [ c.
Griggs , 1. Wordsworth was awed by Coleridge's intellect, by his range of reading, and by the creative fertility of his thought. Wordsworth's hesitant but emerging faith in his own powers in the late s was greatly strengthened by Coleridge's conviction that his friend was destined to be the greatest philosophical poet in the language.
The interplay of their poetry and aesthetic theorizing was subtle and energetic. The Prelude is addressed to Coleridge ; its concluding lines embrace him; its chronicle ends with the summer of , when Wordsworth and Coleridge had ' wantoned in wild Poesy ', rightly, for that was when both poets were happiest, in a creative intimacy they were never to recapture. For the misery of the slow disintegration of their friendship Wordsworth found large compensation in the contentment of his marriage, but Coleridge had no such recourse, and the conviction that Wordsworth had turned against him remained one of the ' griping and grasping Sorrows ' of his life 8 Oct ; Collected Letters , ed.
Griggs , 5. As Wordsworth entered old age he remained physically vigorous; he climbed Helvellyn for the last time when he was seventy. In he visited the Isle of Man and then Scotland, memorializing the latter tour in a series of sonnets. One of his busiest London visits ever occupied two months in , and the following year Wordsworth and Crabb Robinson travelled through France to Italy, seeing Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice, before returning through Germany and Belgium.
Though he lamented that he was too old to use his experiences in fitting poetry, Wordsworth none the less composed one final travel sequence, 'Memorials of a Tour in Italy'.
In he returned to the west country and revisited places such as Alfoxden, made precious by association with Coleridge and Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's fame continued to grow. In he was awarded an honorary degree by Durham University, and in the following year he received one from Oxford at a ceremony in which he was eulogized by John Keble and applauded by a packed audience in the Sheldonian Theatre, including Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough.
The honorand presented the Newdigate prize for poetry to the twenty-year-old John Ruskin. Before the ceremony Wordsworth was entertained by John Henry Newman , among others. After the death of Robert Southey in , Wordsworth was offered the post of poet laureate. After declining initially on the grounds of age, he accepted when Sir Robert Peel insisted that it was the queen's particular wish and that nothing would be required of him.
On 25 April Victoria's laureate knelt before her, wearing court dress borrowed from Samuel Rogers and encumbered by Sir Humphry Davy's sword. Wordsworth's fame drew hundreds of visitors to Rydal Mount, whose names were mostly recorded in the Rydal Mount visitors' book, now in the Wordsworth Library, Grasmere.
In the Lake District circle of which he was the acknowledged ornament, Wordsworth also met Elizabeth Gaskell , William Rathbone Greg , Harriet Martineau , and many other notable figures. In the early s Wordsworth was courted by Frederick William Faber , who took every opportunity to foster the view that Wordsworth was truly the laureate of the Oxford Movement.
The years of Wordsworth's greatest fame, however, were also a time of much personal grief. In Dorothy Wordsworth was taken seriously ill, and in the coming years she fell prey to a form of Alzheimer's disease.
She was nursed at Rydal Mount until her death in , and at the very end of Wordsworth's life Mary Wordsworth remarked that the one thing that continued to give him pleasure was ministering to the ' dear, dear Sister ' of 'Tintern Abbey' reported by Henry Crabb Robinson , 15 Jan []; Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson , 2. Wordsworth's surviving brother, Christopher , master of Trinity College, Cambridge, died in Richard had died in The most deeply felt loss was that of Dora on 9 July , and Wordsworth's grief was intensified by self-reproach.
Passionately devoted to his daughter, Wordsworth had done all he could to prevent her marriage in to Edward Quillinan , a widower thirteen years her senior with two daughters, and in the years before Dora's death he had never fully accepted her choice of husband. By the time of Hartley Coleridge's death on 6 January Wordsworth was waiting for his own. At Hartley's burial in Grasmere churchyard, Wordsworth pointed out to the sexton where his own and Mary's graves were to be, saying that Hartley would have wished to lie near to them.
Having taken pleurisy from recklessly walking out in frosty weather, Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount on 23 April and was buried in the churchyard at St Oswald's, Grasmere, four days later. They too were buried in the churchyard at St Oswald's. A history of the poppy: Why we wear them as a symbol of remembrance and other facts. Unlucky A witches' brew of facts about the European 'witch craze'.
A discovery of witches: British witch trials in the 17th century. In , 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 As he grew older, Wordsworth began to reject radicalism.
In , he was named as a distributor of stamps and moved his family to a new home in the Lake District. By , 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 — he had reached a zenith of creativity between and It was this early work that cemented his reputation as an acclaimed literary figure. In , Wordsworth became England's poet laureate, a position he held for the rest of his life.
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