William Wordsworth (7 April 1770–23 April 1850) was born in what is now named Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland in the Lake District. He 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 (1798).
Wordsworth’s magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published by his widow, Mary, in the year of his death, before which it was generally known as “the poem to Coleridge”. Though it failed to interest people at the time, it has since come to be widely recognised as his masterpiece.
His best-known work is a lyric poem.”I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (also commonly known as “Daffodils“). The poem was inspired by an event on 15 April 1802 when Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came across a “long belt” of daffodils. Written sometime around 1804, it was first published in 1807 in Poems in Two Volumes, and a revised version was published in 1815.
Wordsworth was Britain’s poet laureate.from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April 1850.
Join the discussion
0 people are already talking about this, why not let us know what you think?