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Wordsworth was born as the second of five children in Cockermouth, Cumberland- part of the scenic region in northwest England called the Lake District. With the death of his mother in 1778, his father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School. But in 1783, his father, a lawyer, died leaving little to his offspring (the Earl of Lonsdale owed his attorney £4500, but, despite a judgment against him, did not pay it. His son, however, paid a substantial portion of it in 1802).

Wordsworth began attending St John's College, Cambridge in 1787. In 1790, he visited RevolutionaryThe period of the French Revolution in the history of France covers the years between 1789 and 1799, in which democrats and republicans overthrew the absolute monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church perforce underwent radical restructuring. While France wo FranceThe French Republic or France ( French: Republique francaise or France is a country whose metropolitan territory is located in western Europe, and which is further made up of a collection of overseas islands and territories located in other continents. and supported the Republican movement. The following year, he graduated from Cambridge without distinction. In November, he returned to France and took a walking tour of Europe that included the AlpsThe Alps is the collective name for one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria in the east, Slovenia, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany, through to France in the west. The highest mountain in the Alps is the Mon and ItalyThe Italian Republic or Italy ( Italian: Italia is a country in the south of Europe, consisting mainly of a boot-shaped peninsula together with two large islands in the Mediterranean Sea: Sicily and Sardinia. To the north, where it borders France, Switzer. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon and in 1792 she gave birth to their child, Caroline. Because of lack of money, he returned alone to England that year, but he supported Vallon and his daughter as best he could in later life. The Reign of TerrorThe Reign of Terror (June 1793 July 1794) was a period in the French Revolution characterized by brutal repression The Terror see also state terrorism from a highly centralized political regime, that suspended most of the democratic achievement of the Rev estranged him from the Republican movement and war between France and Britain prevented him from seeing Annette and Caroline again for several years.

1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He received a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing poetry. That year, he also met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in SomersetThis page is about the county of Somerset in the United Kingdom. For other meanings of Somerset, see Somerset (disambiguation). Somerset is a county in the south-west of England. Somerset adjoins Gloucestershire to the north east, Wiltshire to the east, D. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister, DorothyDorothy Wordsworth ( December 25, 1771 January 25 1855) was an English poet and diarist. She was the sister of William Wordsworth. See also: List of English language poets External link http://www. htm Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Dorothy Dorothy Words, moved to Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether StoweyNether Stowey is a small village in Somerset, South West England. It sits in the foothills of the Quantock Hills, just below Over Stowey. It is the birthplace of Robert Parsons and Samuel Grose and was for many years the home of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey" was published in the work, along with Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner".

Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge then travelled to Germany. During the winter of 1798-1799, Wordsworth lived in Goslar and began work on an autobiographical piece later titled The Prelude. He and his sister moved back to England, now to Grasmere in the Lake District, and this time with fellow poet Robert Southey nearby. Wordsworth, Southey, and Coleridge came to be known as the "Lake Poets".

In 1802, he and Dorothy travelled to France to visit Annette and Caroline. Later that year, he married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy did not appreciate the marriage at first, but lived with the couple and later grew close to Mary. The following year, Mary gave birth to the first of five children, John.

Both Coleridge's health and his relationship to Wordsworth began showing signs of decay in 1804. That year Wordsworth befriended Robert Southey. With Napoleon's rise as emperor of France, Wordsworth's last wisp of liberalism fell, and from then on he identified himself as a conservative.

Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call The Recluse. He had in 1798-99 started an autobiographical poem, which he never named but called the " poem to Coleridge", which would serve as an appendix to the The Recluse. In 1804 he began expanding this autobiographical work, having decided to make it a prologue rather than an appendix to the larger work he planned. By 1805, he had completed it, but refused to publish so personal a work until he should have completed the whole of The Recluse. The death of his brother, John, in 1805 had a strong influence on him.

In 1807, his Poems in Two Volumes was published, including "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". Up to this point Wordsworth was known publicly only for Lyrical Ballads, and he hoped this collection would cement his reputation. Its reception was only lukewarm, however. For a time, Wordsworth and Coleridge were estranged over the latter's opium addiction.

Two of his children, Thomas and Catherine, died in 1812. The following year, he moved to Rydal Mount, Ambleside where he spent the rest of his life.

In 1814 he published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part The Recluse. He had not completed the first and third parts, and never would complete them. Modern critics popularly recognize a decline in his works beginning around the mid- 1810s. But, by 1820 he enjoyed the success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works.

Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 that rendered her an invalid for the remainder of her life. In 1835, Wordsworth gave Annette and Caroline the money they needed for support. The government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300 a year in 1842.

With the death in 1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became the Poet Laureate. When his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry came to a standstill. William Wordsworth died in Rydal Mount in 1850 and was buried at St Oswald's Church in Grasmere.

His widow Mary published his lengthy autobiographical "poem to Coleridge" as The Prelude several months after his death. Though this failed to arouse great interest in 1850, it has since come to be recognized as his masterpiece.

The lives of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in particular their collaboration on the "Lyrical Ballads", are treated in the 2000 film Pandaemonium.