Life & Background
Wordsworth was born in the Lake District in 1770 and orphaned young, an early loss that shaped his attachment to landscape and to his sister Dorothy, whose journals fed directly into his poems. He studied at Cambridge and travelled to France in 1790 and 1791, where he supported the Revolution in its early phase and had a daughter, Caroline, with Annette Vallon; war separated them, and the Revolution's descent into Terror produced a crisis of belief he later described in The Prelude. Settled at Dove Cottage in Grasmere from 1799, he wrote his major work in about a decade. He became Poet Laureate in 1843, by which time the younger Romantics regarded him as a political apostate — Browning's 'Lost Leader' is about him.
Lyrical Ballads
Lyrical Ballads is a joint collection with Coleridge that opens with Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and closes with Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth's contributions take their subjects from rural and marginal life: an idiot boy, a forsaken woman, a discharged soldier, a small girl who insists her dead siblings still belong to the family. The 1800 Preface sets out the programme behind them — that the poems deliberately choose incidents from common life and relate them in a selection of language really used by men, on the argument that rural life offers the essential passions of the heart in plainer and more emphatic form.
The Preface is the founding manifesto of English Romanticism, defining poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and, crucially, adding that it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity — a formulation that makes memory rather than immediate sensation the engine of poetic composition. Tintern Abbey establishes the shape Wordsworth uses repeatedly: return to a remembered place, comparison of past and present selves, and a recovered consolation that is not the same as the original joy. The Prelude, his long autobiographical poem, treats the growth of a poet's mind as an epic subject, organising itself around 'spots of time' — charged childhood episodes that retain a renovating power.
Why Wordsworth Matters
Wordsworth changed both the subject matter and the diction of English poetry, and the 1800 Preface is the single most examined critical document of the Romantic period — its argument against eighteenth-century poetic diction is the pivot from Pope's world to the nineteenth century. His conception of nature as a moral and formative presence, and of childhood as the source of imaginative power, shaped Victorian and modern poetry alike. He is also the standard case study in Romantic politics: youthful radicalism, disillusion, and the conservative later career.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Lyrical Ballads (with Coleridge)1798
- Tintern Abbey1798
- Preface to Lyrical Ballads1800
- Lucy poems1798–1801
- Ode: Intimations of Immortality1807
- The Excursion1814
- The Prelude1850