William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
He is the second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland[1]—part of the scenic region in northwest England, the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was Master, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.[2] Their father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. Wordsworth, as with his siblings, had little involvement with their father, and they would be distant from him until his death in 1783.
Wordsworth 's father, although rarely present, taught him poetry, including that of Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser, in addition to allowing his son to rely on his own father 's library. Along with spending time reading in Cockermouth, Wordsworth would also stay at his mother 's parents ' house in Penrith, Cumberland. At Penrith, Wordsworth was exposed to the moors. Wordsworth could not get along with his grandparents and his uncle, and his hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide.
After the death of their mother, in 1778, John Wordsworth sent William to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire (now in Cumbria) and Dorothy to live with relatives
Bibliography: Poetry An Evening Walk (1793) Descriptive Sketches (1793) Borders (1795) Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey (1798) Lyrical Ballads (1798) Upon Westminster Bridge (1801) Intimations of Immortality (1806) Miscellaneous Sonnets (1807) Poems I-II (1807) The Excursion (1814) The White Doe of Rylstone (1815) Peter Bell (1819) The Waggoner (1819) The River Duddon (1820) Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822) Memorials of a Tour of the Continent (1822) Yarrow Revisited (1835) The Prelude Or Growth of a Poet 's Mind (1850) The Recluse (1888) The Poetical Works (1949) Selected Poems (1959) Complete Poetical Works (1971) Poems (1977) Prose Prose Works (1896) Literary Criticism (1966) Letters of Dorothy and William Wordsworth (1967) Letters of the Wordsworth Family (1969) Prose Works (1974) The Love Letters of William and Mary Wordsworth (1981) Essays Essay Upon Epitaphs (1810)