William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770 -1850) started his literary life as pioneering Romantic revolutionary poet and finished as Poet Laureate.

From a young age, his father introduced him to the works of Shakespeare and Milton. Despite a difficult childhood with a frequently absent father, Wordsworth went on to study at St. John’s College, Cambridge where he published his first work, a sonnet in the European Magazine. After graduating Cambridge, Wordsworth received a generous grant of £900, that enabled him to pursue a career in literature. In the same year, he also met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset, with whom he formed an immediate and imaginatively vital companionship.

His friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the springboard from which his poetic talent was launched. Together they published The Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Wordsworth's The Prelude (1799), was originally dedicated to Coleridge. In the new century, he distanced himself from Coleridge. These works had a profound impact on the course of poetry written in English.

His work then began a long decline writing about the necessity of the death penalty, and later steam engines - which calls into question the tendency to regard all the output of any great poet or writer to be of significance, let alone of equal interest. The one gem from the post 1820 period that stands out is his 'Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg' which is only a few lines long.

Wordsworth was created Poet Laureate in 1843. He is the only Poet Laureate who did not publish anything during his Laureateship.

Andrew Keanie explores the work and relationships of Wordsworth and Coleridge in several books for Greenwich Exchange including Wordsworth and Coleridge: Views from the Meticulous to the Sublime and also, if you are more interested in Coleridge, we have a book, also written by Keanie entitled Samuel Taylor Coleridge.