32 Facts About William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads.

William Wordsworth was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850.

William Wordsworth remains one of the most recognizable names in English poetry and was a key figure of the Romantic poets.

William Wordsworth's father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town.

William Wordsworth was frequently away from home on business, so the young William and his siblings had little involvement with him and remained distant until he died in 1783.

William Wordsworth spent time at his mother's parents' house in Penrith, Cumberland, where he was exposed to the moors but did not get along with his grandparents or uncle, who lived there.

William Wordsworth was taught to read by his mother, and he first attended a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth, then a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families.

William Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else.

William Wordsworth debuted as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine.

William Wordsworth returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at Cambridge and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape.

William Wordsworth fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who, in 1792, gave birth to their daughter Caroline.

Mary was anxious that William Wordsworth should do more for Caroline.

The second edition, published in 1800, had only William Wordsworth listed as the author and included a preface to the poems.

William Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility", and calls his own poems in the book "experimental".

Between 1795 and 1797, William Wordsworth wrote his only play, The Borderers, a verse tragedy set during the reign of King Henry III of England, when Englishmen in the North Country came into conflict with Scottish border reivers.

William Wordsworth wrote several other famous poems in Goslar, including "The Lucy poems".

When Coleridge arrived back in England, he travelled to the North with their publisher, Joseph Cottle, to meet William Wordsworth and undertake a proposed tour of the Lake District.

William Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call The Recluse.

William Wordsworth completed this work, now generally referred to as the first version of The Prelude, in 1805, but refused to publish such a personal work until he had completed the whole of The Recluse.

In particular, while he was in revolutionary Paris in 1792, the 22-year-old William Wordsworth met the mysterious traveller John "Walking" Stewart, who was nearing the end of his thirty years of wandering, on foot, from Madras, India, through Persia and Arabia, across Africa and Europe, and up through the fledgling United States.

In 1807, William Wordsworth published Poems, in Two Volumes, including "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood".

Until now, William Wordsworth was known only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this new collection would cement his reputation.

In 1814, William Wordsworth published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part work The Recluse even though he never completed the first or third parts.

William Wordsworth did write a poetic Prospectus to The Recluse in which he laid out the structure and intention of the whole work.

William Wordsworth remarked in 1812 that he was willing to shed his blood for the established Church of England, reflected in his Ecclesiastical Sketches of 1822.

Behler has pointed out the fact that William Wordsworth wanted to invoke the basic feeling that a human heart possesses and expresses.

William Wordsworth has used conversation in his poetry to let the poet 'I' merge into 'We'.

In 1838, William Wordsworth received an honorary doctorate in Civil Law from the University of Durham.

William Wordsworth initially refused the honour, saying that he was too old, but accepted when the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, assured him that "you shall have nothing required of you".

William Wordsworth thus became the only poet laureate to write no official verses.

William Wordsworth died at home at Rydal Mount from an aggravated case of pleurisy on 23 April 1850, and was buried at St Oswald's Church, Grasmere.

William Wordsworth has appeared as a character in works of fiction, including:.