05 Mar Inwrite

Author Spotlight: William Wordsworth


The Renaissance was a great time for discovery not only in the fields of science and industry but also in those of art and literature. One of its greatest writers was William Shakespeare, writer of such plays as Hamlet, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet. This era had also produced another William, one who exceled in poetry—William Wordsworth.

Wordsworth was born in England in the eighteenth century. As a child, he was taught how to read by his mother and was encouraged by his father to read works by Milton, Shakespeare, and Spenser. He also started attending a school for upper-class families that valued both academic pursuits and the preservation of tradition. After his mother’s death, Wordsworth was send to Hawkshead Grammar School.

In 1787, Wordsworth published a sonnet in the European Magazine. At the same time, he had also started attending St. John’s College in Cambridge, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1791. In 1790, Wordsworth toured Europe and, a year later, fell in love with a French woman.

Wordsworth published his first poetry collections, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches, in 1793. Two years later, he inherited nine hundred pounds from Raisley Calvert. This sum allowed him to pursue poetry professionally. That same year, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he would collaborate throughout their lives.

In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, an important work that ushered in the Romantic movement in England. Lyrical Ballads contained poems authored by both Wordsworth and Coleridge and studied by scholars over the years. The collection was also edited and republished multiple times, with the final edition published in 1805.

Other than poetry, Wordsworth also forayed into playwriting. He composed his only play, The Borderers, around 1795–1797. The play is a tragedy written in verse, set in the reign of King Henry III, about Englishmen who come into conflict with Scottish rovers. The play was published in 1842.

In the same year that Lyrical Ballads was published, Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and Coleridge moved to Germany, where Wordsworth was inspired to write his autobiography and magnum opus, The Prelude. The piece was a blank-verse long poem containing fourteen books, initially intended to be an introduction to an epic philosophical poem, The Recluse. However, he never finished the latter. The Prelude contained very personal details about his life and work. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge initially intended for The Recluse to be longer than John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Had they succeeded, The Recluse would have been three times as long. The Prelude was something that Wordsworth had kept working on up until his death.

While writing what would be his magnum opus, Wordsworth managed to write even more poetry. In 1814, he published The Excursion, intended to be the second part of The Recluse, even though he had never finished the first nor the third.

In his later years, Wordsworth started gaining a reputation as a valuable poet. He was awarded honorary degrees at the University of Durham and the University of Oxford. In 1843, he was made England’s poet laureate. In 1850, Wordsworth died of pleurisy, an inflammation of lung membranes. His widow published the then-untitled “Poem to Coleridge” as The Prelude three months after his passing. At the time, not too many people were interested in it, but it soon gained a reputation as a masterpiece.

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