“Wordsworth on Helvellyn,” by Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1842. Wikimedia Commons · public domain.
Poet · Pairing III
William Wordsworth
1770–1850 · Founder of English Romanticism · Poet Laureate, 1843–1850
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”
William Wordsworth helped launch the Romantic movement in English poetry. In 1798, together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he published Lyrical Ballads — a book whose famous preface argued that poetry should be written in “the real language of men” about ordinary life and the natural world, rather than in grand, artificial diction.
He spent much of his life in the English Lake District, whose mountains, lakes, and fields became both his home and his great subject. As cities were transformed by the Industrial Revolution, Wordsworth insisted that time spent in nature was essential to the health of the human soul — a conviction that runs straight through “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1807), inspired by a walk he took with his sister Dorothy along Ullswater.
His masterpiece is The Prelude, a book-length autobiographical poem tracing “the growth of a poet’s mind,” published after his death. He was made Poet Laureate in 1843 and remains one of the most influential poets in the language.
In this curriculum
Read him in Pairing III — The Natural World →