William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was one of Britain’s most eminent poets. He was a major poet of the Romantic Movement and was appointed England’s Poet Laureate in 1843. Wordsworth is recognized for his lyrical style of poetry, which was inspired by the landscape of the Lake District, where he spent much of his life. His best work is such poems as “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (also commonly known as “Daffodils,”) “The Ruined Cottage,” “Michael,” “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” and “The Solitary Reaper.”
Born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, Wordsworth graduated from Cambridge and then traveled to Europe. During the French Revolution, he left a young family behind in France and returned to England. He settled in with his beloved sister and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Wordsworth and Coleridge took long walks together in the Lake District, expounding about philosophy and English poetry, which they believed was too precise and prudish and did not appeal to the ordinary person. Together they wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798) in which they wrote poetry in everyday speech. First published without the names of the authors, the poems were greeted with resentment by most critics, but Lyrical Ballads arguably defined the Romantic Movement.
Wordsworth’s major work was his autobiographical poem The Prelude “containing views of Man, Nature, and Society.” Completed in 1805, he continued to revise it. It was published after his death.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by William Wordsworth
Wisdom is oft times nearer when we stoop than when we soar.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Wisdom
Life is divided into three terms – that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present to live better in the future.
—William Wordsworth
The thought of our past years in me doth breed perpetual benedictions.
—William Wordsworth
To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Flowers, Thought
The world is too must: with us; late and soon, getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: World, Nature
Whether we be young or old, our destiny, our being’s heart and home, is with infinitude, and only there; with hope it is, hope that can never die, effort and expectation, and desire, and something evermore about to be.
—William Wordsworth
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Youth, Children, Childhood
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Action
Our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence.
—William Wordsworth
To character and success, two things, contradictory as they may seem, must go together – humble dependence and manly independence: humble dependence on God and manly reliance on self.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Self-reliance
The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Age, Aging
The best portion of a good man’s life: his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
—William Wordsworth
How does the meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free down to its root, and in that freedom bold.
—William Wordsworth
Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd.
—William Wordsworth
Come forth into the light of things. Let Nature be your teacher.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Nature
Miss not the occasion; by the fore lock take that subtle power, the never-halting time.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Opportunity
Our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence.
—William Wordsworth
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