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William WordsworthA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Considered one of the founders of English literary Romanticism, Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cumberland, in the Lake District of northern England. The landscape of this area, with its combination of “beauty and fear,” would influence his Romanticist ideas about nature. An indifferent student at St. John’s College, Cambridge, Wordsworth found more inspiration from travels in Revolutionary France, where new republican ideas would become a key influence on his thinking.
Wordsworth’s “marvelous year” is considered to have been 1797 to 1798, during which he met the fellow English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). With Coleridge’s influence, Wordsworth abandoned the long, narrative poems he had been writing in favor of short lyric and dramatic poems cast in simple language and describing human nature and the natural environment. The two poets jointly published their poems in the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge’s long narrative “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and closed with Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”
With Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth (who wrote all but four of the poems in the book) is considered to have inaugurated the English Romantic movement.
By William Wordsworth
A Complaint
William Wordsworth
A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal
William Wordsworth
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
William Wordsworth
Daffodils
William Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
William Wordsworth
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey ...
William Wordsworth
London, 1802
William Wordsworth
Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
My Heart Leaps Up
William Wordsworth
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
William Wordsworth
She Dwelt Among The Untrodden Ways
William Wordsworth
She Was a Phantom of Delight
William Wordsworth
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
The Solitary Reaper
William Wordsworth
The World Is Too Much with Us
William Wordsworth
To the Skylark
William Wordsworth
We Are Seven
William Wordsworth
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