Lyrical Ballads with Coleridge lit the Romantic fuse
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850), with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, opened English Romanticism through Lyrical Ballads (1798). The Prelude—revised for decades and issued after his death by his wife—stands as his vast autobiographical mountain poem; he served as Poet Laureate from 1843 until pleurisy killed him.
His father, an agent for the Earl of Lonsdale, was often away but set the boy to memorise long stretches of Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. Stays with his mother's family in Penrith went so badly that he contemplated suicide. After his mother died in 1778 he was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School while his sister Dorothy went to Yorkshire relatives; the two did not see each other for nine years. At a Penrith school he had already met Mary Hutchinson, his future wife. Of his brothers, John drowned captaining the wrecked Earl of Abergavenny in 1805 and Christopher became Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
He published a sonnet in The European Magazine in 1787, entered St John's College, Cambridge, and in 1790 walked across the Alps, France, Switzerland and Italy. Visiting Revolutionary France in 1791 he embraced republicanism and fell for Annette Vallon, a royalist's daughter who bore their daughter Caroline in 1792. He returned to England alone, the Terror soured him on the Revolution, and in 1802 he met the nine-year-old Caroline for the first time at Calais before marrying Mary. From 1816 he paid her £30 a year.
A £900 legacy from Raisley Calvert in 1795 freed him to write. That year he met Coleridge, and he and Dorothy lived at Racedown in Dorset before moving to Alfoxton, a few miles from Coleridge in Nether Stowey. Lyrical Ballads appeared anonymously, pairing Tintern Abbey with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
The 1800 edition named only Wordsworth and added a preface that became a cornerstone of Romantic theory, calling for verse in the everyday language people actually speak rather than ornate 18th-century diction, and defining poetry as powerful feeling recollected in tranquillity. Before his widow titled it, the long autobiographical work was known simply as the Poem to Coleridge.
Source: William Wordsworth
