William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was an English poet, born at Cockermouth in Cumberland and raised among the lakes and mountains that are the landscape of his work. Orphaned young, he went to Cambridge, walked through France in the first years of the Revolution and in 1798 published with Coleridge the Lyrical Ballads, the book that opened English Romanticism. He settled at Grasmere with his sister Dorothy, and wrote there the poems of his great decade, including Tintern Abbey, the Immortality Ode and The Prelude, his autobiography in verse, which he withheld until his death. He grew conservative with age and was Poet Laureate for his last seven years.