Wordsworth, William : The Lake Poet

 William Wordsworth:

 (1770-1850)

English poet William Wordsworth was born in Cumberland of Yorkshire stock in 1770. He remained all his life very much a north countryman. When his mother died in 1778, he was sent to Hawkshead school. There he enjoyed a happy and free childhood and acquired a special childlike relationship with love of nature.

In 1787 he went to St. John’s College Cambridge. There he passed an idle and unsatisfied life. His uncle intended hum to go into the Church but he went to France and lack of money brought him back to England . In 1793, he published two poems 'An Evening' and 'Descriptive Sketches'. These poems had broken the chain of 18th century poetic diction. A timely legacy of £900 from a friend enabled him to settle down in Somerset with his sister Dorothy.

Dorothy’s  kindness and Coleridge (his friend) help made him stable foe the great Creative period ahead. With this help he published “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798 which was a land mark in English literature. In this poem he used the speech of ordinary men instead of the conventional poetic diction of the 18th century. He also dropped the outworn ‘Heroic Couplet’ in favor of the ballad.

In 1804 he married an old friend Mary Hutchinson. They had five children out of which two survived him. Wordsworth had been a great philosophical poems to be called “The Recluse”! He worked on “the Prelude” until 1805 but it was not published until 1850 after his death. The third id Wordsworth’s central achievements was poems in “Two volumes in 1807. This contained the remainder of his beat mature work including the wonderful “Ode of Intimations of Immortality”.

Thereafter, Wordsworth’s creative powers declined he did nothing new in poetry after 1807. Wordsworth was not so much poet of nature as of man in nature. He valued in humanity what is permanent in it. He was great original who broke the convention and poured imagination back into poetry. He also intended language and forms such as blank verse and the sonnet.

Above all he was one of those rarest poets of joy of heart- erasing things. He died in 1850 at the age of 80 and was buried in Grasmere, in his beloved Lake District, which he had made his home since 1799.

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