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Unit 9: Daffodils by William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, Notes
with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with
the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth’s magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical
poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously
titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as “the poem to Coleridge”.
Wordsworth was Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

9.1.1 Early Life

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 —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. 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, Wordsworth 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, Wordsworth’s father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar
School in Lancashire (now in Cumbria) and Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire; she and
Wordsworth would not meet again for another nine years. Although Hawkshead was
Wordsworth’s first serious experience with education, he had been taught to read by his mother
and had attended a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth. After the Cockermouth School,
he was sent to a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families and taught by Ann
Birkett, a woman who insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included pursuing
both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day, and Shrove
Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the
school that Wordsworth was to meet the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who would be his future
wife.
Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European
Magazine. That same year he began attending St John’s College, Cambridge, and received his
B.A. degree in 1791. He returned to Hawkshead for his first two summer holidays, and often
spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape.
In 1790, he took a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and
visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.

9.1.2 Relationship with Annette Vallon

In November 1791, Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France and became enthralled with the
Republican movement. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who in 1792 gave
birth to their child, Caroline. Because of lack of money and Britain’s tensions with France, he

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