Wordsworth, William (30592)

William Wordsworth was born in a small village of England where he spent a happy childhood in contact with nature.
He lost his mother when he was 8 years old and his father when he was 13. He had three brothers and a sister, Dorothy.
When he grew up he attended Cambridge. Then he went to France, attracted by the new democratic ideas.
There he had a love affair with Annett Vallon. They had a daughter, Caroline. Probably he also had in mind to marry Annett, but this never happened because Wordsworth’s family, that was against this decision, prevented him to.
When he returned to England, in 1793, the war between France and England broke out, so he could not reach out Annett, who had stayed in France.
In 1795 he met Samuel Coleridge, another famous English writer, and they became friends.

Wordsworth started writing poems when he was still a little boy and continued to do it for all his life.
His literary production can be divided into two groups:
1) longer poems;
2) miscellaneous poems.
But his masterpiece is surely “The Lyrical Ballads”, written together with Coleridge. It preface can considered the Manifesto of the Romantic Movement in England.
Wordsworth’s aim was to reconcile realism with poetry. To do such a thing he needed to draw inspiration from everyday life and to write in a language and with a style very close the actual spoken English.
Also other poets has tried to do something similar in the past, but Wordsworth was the one to completely solve the problem and in the second preface of the Lyrical Ballads, in fact, he exposed all these literary theories of his.