WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: A brief BIOGRAPHY
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[based on "bio" field in my Hypercard stack,
    _Wordsworth'sGreatestHits_] 


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	** WILLIAM WORDSWORTH was born April 7th, 1770 in the
village of Cockermouth (in Cumberland County), located in the
Lake District of northwestern England. (Thus he would later
be labelled a "Lake Poet," along with Coleridge and Southey.)
His mother Ann died when William was only eight, and his
father John, a lawyer, followed suit when the budding poet
was but thirteen. (Critics have made much of Wordsworth's
early maternal loss and his subsequent use of Nature as a
"surrogate mother.") In 1779, he began attending grammar
school at Hawkshead (a little southeast, in Lancashire),
where he would spend the next eight years, lodging during the
school year with Ann Tyson, the revered "old dame" of _The_
_Prelude_; holidays were often spent with his grandparents in
Penrith (back in Cumberland).
	1787-1791 were his college years, at St. John's College,
Cambridge (WAY southeast; north of London), the unpleasant
taste of which is also recounted in _The_Prelude_. The drudgery
of academics was interrupted by a walking tour over the
French and Swiss Alps in 1790 and another such tour into
Wales (including Mt. Snowden) in 1791, both with Robert
Jones, a fellow Cambridge student. 1792 found Wordsworth in
France, amidst the ongoing tumult of the French Revolution.
Here he met Michel Beaupuy, a French officer whose fostering
of the poet's appreciation for radical politics is spoken of
fondly in _The_Prelude_, and Annette Vallon, the courtship of
whom resulted in the birth of an illegitimate child, Caroline
. . . a relationship NOT mentioned in _The_Prelude_!
	Returning to England, Wordworth published _An_Evening_Walk_
and _Descriptive_Sketches_ (both long "travelogues" in heroic
couplets) in 1793. A walking tour that year took Wordsworth
across the Salisbury Plain and to Tintern Abbey (east of
Wales), both subjects of later poems. He was finally reunited
for good with his sister Dorothy in 1794. In 1795, in London,
he met the philosopher William Godwin and the poets Southey
and--Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The end of this year found
William and Dorothy at Racedown Lodge (Dorset, in England's
southwest), to which Coleridge would become a regular visitor
in 1797. One of the great friendships of literary history
begun, the Wordsworths moved that same year to Alfoxden
(Somerset; just northwest of Dorset), only three miles from
Coleridge's place at Nether Stowey.
	In 1798 (called the _annus_mirabilis_, because of
Wordsworth's great outpouring of great verse), he & Coleridge
published _Lyrical_Ballads_, firing the first major salvo of
the Romantic revolt in England. (But the poems were almost
universally condemned by the critics because of their "low"
subject matter and language, as was most of his output until
the 1820's.) Wordsworth & Dorothy then followed Coleridge to
Germany, spending a wretched 1798-99 winter at Goslar. Late
1799 found the pair back in the Lake District, at Dove
Cottage, Grasmere (in Westmoreland), where the pair (soon to
be joined by his bride) would live almost eight years. In
1800, the 2nd edition of _Lyrical_Ballads_ included
Wordsworth's famous prose "Preface," in which he defined
poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it
takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity"
and called for poetry to be written in "the real language of
men."
   	In 1802, he journeyed back to France to visit Annette and
his daughter, as if to tie up loose ends; for later that
year, he married Mary Hutchinson, with whom he had five
children by 1810.  1805 was marked by his brother John's
death in a shipwreck, an event mourned in several of
Wordsworth's poems. In 1808, the family moved to another
house in Grasmere, Allan Bank, and then to Grasmere Rectory
in 1811, but the poor chimney set-ups in both places made the
Wordsworths miserable because of the backed-up smoke! Causes
for greater misery during this period, however, were the
poet's estrangement from Coleridge in 1810 and the death of
two of his children, Catherine and Thomas, in 1812.
	In 1813, the Wordsworths made their final move, to Rydal
Mount, just southeast of Grasmere. He could now afford a
decent place after having acquired the position of
Distributor of Stamps (translation: "tax man"!) for the
region. (From this "sell-out" to economic necessity comes
Browning's condemnatory "Just for a handful of silver he left
us.") He did, however, make many trips thereafter, including
various tours to the Continent--one a nostalgic return to the
Alps in 1820--and to Scotland (befriending Sir Walter Scott),
Wales, and Ireland. Many of these trips included long
sojourns on foot; indeed, Wordsworth, an inveterate walker
and mountain climber, last climbed to the top of Helvellyn,
one of the highest peaks in England, at the age of--70! And
yet, though commonly stereotyped as a reclusive "nature poet"
who had retreated back to the Lake District for life,
Wordsworth actually came to enjoy occasional visits among
London's "high society." Even when at home, he was frequently
visited by a growing number of "fans" (among them, Ralph
Waldo Emerson) who wanted a glimpse of, a word from, the
"Sage of Grasmere."
	Ironically, although Wordsworth was finally (and justly)
famous, his poetic "powers" had declined, with only a few new
gems now interspersed among countless smug odes and
sententious sonnets. Lovers of Wordsworth tend to downplay
the poet's later years, and not just because of the quality
of the poems: he became at last both a political and
religious conservative, and anecdotal testimony reveals a
rather stuffy and self-absorbed fellow--his "egotistical
sublime," as Keats had called it, now apparently less
"sublime" and more human.
	By 1835, after several painful illnesses, Dorothy slipped
permanently into dotage from a condition at least similar to
Alzheimer's. Better news came in 1843, when he was appointed
Poet Laureate, upon Southey's death. But a series of deaths
of close friends and family members culminated in the death
of the daughter he'd always doted on, Dora, in 1847, and now
he seemed only to wait for his own demise. A case of pleurisy
worsened after a walk in the cold March weather, and he died
on April 23rd, 1850.

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* Chief ORIGINAL Publications of Wordsworth's Poetry:
        1798: _Lyrical_Ballads_
        1801: _Lyrical_Ballads_, 2nd ed. (dated 1800; 1st appearance
                of "Preface")
        1802: _Lyrical_Ballads_, 3rd ed. (revised "Preface")
        1807: _Poems_in_Two_Volumes_
        1814: _The_Excursion_
        1815: _Collected_Poems_ (1st ed.); _The_White_Doe_of_Rylstone_
        1819: _Peter_Bell_; _The_Waggoner_
        1820: _The_River_Duddon_; _Miscellaneous_Poems_
        1822: Memorials_of_a Tour_of_the_Continent_;
                _Ecclesiastical_Sketches_
        1835: _Yarrow_Revisited_and_Other_Poems_
        1842: _The_Borderers_; _Poems_,_Chiefly_of_Early_and_Late_Years_
        1849-50: _Collected_Poems_ (last personally revised ed.)
        1850: _The_Prelude_ (posthumous)
        1888: [_The_Fragment_of_] _The_Recluse_ (posthumous)


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