Wordsworth

Wordsworth

Romantic poet, William Wordsworth is one of the giants of English poetry and criticism. He was born on April 7, 1770 in the Lake District of northern England. Together with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he produced Lyrical Ballads, an important work in the English Romantic movement which included Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” and ended with Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” Wordsworth along with Coleridge and Robert Southey were known as the Lake Poets, the elite of English poetry. Wordsworth is best known for his work The Prelude, a lengthy autobiographical poem begun before he was 30 but never published in his lifetime. The Excursion, a poem of epic length, was considered by William Hazlitt and John Keats to be among the wonders of the age. Wordsworth also revived the sonnet and is one of the greatest masters of that form having written over 523 sonnets in the course of his lifetime. In 1843, he became the Poet Laureate of England until his death in 1850. Wordsworth died at the age of 80 at Rydal Mount in his beloved Lakeland home on April 23. He is buried in the churchyard of the nearby village of Grasmere.