William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who was the Poet Laureate from 1843 to his death in 1850. Born in the Lake District of northwest England, his surroundings would influence him all his poetic life. Many of his early poems dealing with loss and abandonment may be traced to the death of his mother when he was only eight years old. He was exceedingly close to his sister, Dorothy, and they, often together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, took many walking tours in England and abroad. He and Coleridge launched the new Romantic Age in English literature with their joint production in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads, which contained Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner†and Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbeyâ€. (Coleridge and Wordsworth were estranged for a time, due to the latter’s disapproval of his friend’s opium addiction.) Wordsworth’s avowed intention was to effect a voice for “the common manâ€, in a move toward a less stilted reality. William Wordsworth did sire a child out of wedlock by a Frenchwoman, but he did provide for her financially. He married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson, and they had five children together, three of whom the parents outlived. It seems to have been the death of his daughter, Dora, in 1847, that left him with little energy for going on creatively. He died in 1850 of pleurisy.
