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William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=303

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on William Wordsworth including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.bartleby.com/145/

This link connects you to The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth hosted by the Bartleby Project of Columbia University.

BIOGRAPHY

The second of five children born to John and Anne Wordsworth, William Wordsworth was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School after the death of his mother in 1778. While at Hawkshead, Wordsworth became an orphan with the death of his father. After Hawkshead, Wordsworth entered St. John's College, Cambridge in 1787 and the next summer he became a prodigious walker in the English countryside. Two years later he took his famous walking tour of France, Switzerland, and Germany. After graduating from Cambridge, Wordsworth returned to France in 1791. At this time, Wordsworth entered into a relationship with Annette Vallon, with whom he fathered a daughter, Caroline, in 1792. Returning to England at the time of the Reign of Terror, Wordsworth would not return to France for another nine years. Meanwhile, Wordsworth kept company with his sister Dorothy and met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with whom he would collaborate on the 1798 volume Lyrical Ballads. Its famous "Preface" advocated a Romantic poetics based on the "common speech" of vernacular English. With the Peace of Amiens in 1802, Wordsworth returned briefly to France before marrying Mary Hutchinson. Poems in Two Volumes (1807) increased Wordsworth's reputation as poet. and in 1813 he was appointed Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, which gave him a modicum of financial security while he lived in the Lake District's Rydal Mount. With the death of Robert Southey in 1843, Wordsworth became Poet Laureate. Although completed in earlier drafts as early as 1805, Wordsworth's greatest work The Prelude was published posthumously the year of his death in 1850.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Barker, Juliet R. V. Wordsworth: A Life. New York: Viking, 2000.

Benis, Toby R. Romanticism on the Road: The Marginal Gains of Wordsworth's Homeless. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Bromwich, David. Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790's. Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1998.

Caruth, Cathy. Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1991.

Gill, Stephen Charles. Wordsworth and the Victorians. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Hanley, Keith. Wordsworth: A Poet's History. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001.

Matlak, Richard E. The Poetry of Relationship: The Wordsworths and Coleridge, 1797-1800. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.

Wesbrook, Deeanne. Wordsworth's Biblical Ghosts. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER