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Classic Poetry from Passions in Poetry


William Wordsworth 1770 - 1850

English Romantic poet and poet-laureate, whose Lyrical Ballads (1798), first published anonymously with contributions by his friend Coleridge, marked an important turning point in the history of English literature. Some of his many well-known poems include 'The Brothers', 'Michael' and the "Lucy" poems: 'She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways', 'Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known', 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal' and 'Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower'. His other great work, the philosophical-autobiographical poem The Prelude was published posthumously in 1850. He also published two poems dealing with the sublime and the picturesque; An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches (both in 1793), and his one and only play The Borders (1842). Wordsworth's name, perhaps even more so than that of his friend Coleridge, remains to this day almost synonymous, in England, with Romanticism itself.

Biography

Wordsworth, born in his beloved Lake District, was the son of an attorney. He went to school first at Penrith and then at Hawkshead Grammar school before studying, from 1787, at St John's College, Cambridge - all of which periods were later to be described vividly in The Prelude. In 1790 he went with friends on a walking tour to France, the Alps and Italy, before arriving in France where Wordsworth was to spend the next year.

Whilst in France he fell in love twice over: once with a young French woman, Annette Vallon, who subsequently bore him a daughter, and then, once more, with the French Revolution. Returning to England he wrote, and left unpublished, his Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff - a tract in support of the French Revolutionary cause. In 1795, after receiving a legacy, Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy first in Dorset and then at Alfoxden, Dorset, close to Coleridge.

In these years he wrote many of his greatest poems and also travelled with Coleridge and Dorothy, in the winter of 1798-79, to Germany. Two years later the second and enlarged edition of the Lyrical Ballads appeared in 1801, just one year before Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. This was followed, in 1807, by the publication of Poems in Two Volumes, which included the poems 'Resolution and Independence' and 'Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood'.

During this period he also made new friendships with Walter Scott, Sir G. Beaumont and De Quincy, wrote such poems as 'Elegaic Stanzas suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle' (1807), and fathered five children. He received a civil list pension in 1842 and was made poet-laureate just one year later.

Today Wordsworth's poetry remains widely read. Its almost universal appeal is perhaps best explained by Wordsworth's own words on the role, for him, of poetry; what he called "the most philosophical of all writing" whose object is "truth...carried alive into the heart by passion".

Available Poems
Admonition to a Traveller
The Affliction of Margaret
Animal Tranquility and Decay
By the Sea
The Fountain
The Green Linnet
I Travelled Among Unknown Men
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
Influence of Natural Objects
The Leech-Gatherer
The Lesser Celandine
Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey
London, 1802
Lucy Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known
Mutability
My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold
Ode
Ode to Duty
On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic
The Reaper
The Reverie of Poor Susan
Ruth: Or The Influences of Nature
Scorn Not the Sonnet; Critic, You Have Frowned
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
She Was a Phantom of Delight
Simon Lee, The Old Huntsman
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
The Sun Has Long Been Set
Surprised By Joy
Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland
Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower
To a Skylark
To Sleep
To the Cuckoo
To the Daisy
To the Daisy
To Toussaint L'Ouverture
The Two April Mornings
Upon Westminster Bridge
When I Have Borne in Memory What Has Tamed
Within King's College Chapel, Cambridge
The World Is Too Much With Us; Late and Soon
Written in Early Spring
Written in London, September, 1802
Yarrow Visited
Yew-Trees

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