William Wordsworth

Born in Cockermouth in England's Lake District in 1770, William Wordsworth grew up surrounded by the scenery that would become central to his poetry. He studied at Cambridge, lived through the age of the French Revolution, and developed a style that treated ordinary life and common language as worthy subjects for serious verse.

Wordsworth is best known as one of the founders of English Romanticism. With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, a book often seen as a turning point in English literature. He is also closely associated with his sister Dorothy Wordsworth, whose companionship and journals were an important part of his creative life.

Across poems including Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, and the long autobiographical work The Prelude, he explored memory, childhood, feeling, and humanity's bond with nature. Later in life he became Poet Laureate of Britain, and by the time of his death in 1850 he was widely recognized as one of the major poets in English.