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
For I have learned
To look on the nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense of sublime
Of something far more deeply infused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the minds of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All living things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains, and of all that we behold
From this green earth, of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear—both what they half create,
And what they perceive, will be pleased to recognize
In nature and the Language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart and soul
Of all my moral being.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Music, Wilderness, Nature
Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Gardening
The flower that smells the sweetest is shy and lowly.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Flowers
That blessed mood in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Contentment
Poetry is most just to its divine origin, when it administers the comforts and breathes the thoughts of religion.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Poetry
A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor.
—William Wordsworth
No motion has she now, no force; she neither hears nor sees; rolled around in earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Dying, Death
Sweetest melodies are those that are y distance made more sweet.
—William Wordsworth
Our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence.
—William Wordsworth
Stern winter loves a dirge-like sound.
—William Wordsworth
Thou unassuming common-place of Nature, with that homely face.
—William Wordsworth
I am already kindly disposed towards you. My friendship it is not in my power to give: this is a gift which no man can make, it is not in our own power: a sound and healthy friendship is the growth of time and circumstance, it will spring up and thrive li
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Friends and Friendship
Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Writers
For by superior energies; more strict affiance in each other; faith more firm in their unhallowed principles, the bad have fairly earned a victory over the weak, the vacillating, inconsistent good.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Defeat
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: Independence, Self-reliance
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
Wild is the music of autumnal winds the faded woods.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Autumn
The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless, lie scattered at the feet of men like flowers.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Charity
Huge and mighty forms that do not live like living men, moved slowly through the mind by day and were trouble to my dreams.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Dreams
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Weather
Not Chaos, not the darkest pit of lowest Erebus, nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out by help of dreams—can breed such fear and awe as fall upon us often when we look into our Minds, into the Mind of Man.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Mind, The Mind
The Solitary answered: Such a Form
Full well I recollect. We often crossed
Each other’s path; but, as the Intruder seemed
Fondly to prize the silence which he kept,
And I as willingly did cherish mine,
We met, and passed, like shadows. I have heard,
From my good Host, that being crazed in brain
By unrequited love, he scaled the rocks,
Dived into caves, and pierced the matted woods,
In hope to find some virtuous herb of power
To cure his malady!
—William Wordsworth
Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd.
—William Wordsworth
Pleasure is spread through the earth. In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Gifts, Happiness
Lost in a gloom of uninspired research.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Research
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 mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Aging, Age
As high as we have mounted in delight, in our dejection do we sing as low.
—William Wordsworth
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses
A six years’ Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where ‘mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother’s kisses,
With light upon him from his father’s eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Children
Self-inspection—the best cure for self-esteem.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Self-improvement
Who swerves from innocence, who makes divorce of that serene companion, a good name, recovers not his loss; but walks with shame, with doubt, with fear, and haply with remorse.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Reputation
Lady of the Mere, Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Romance
The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Drugs
She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Nature
To me the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Thought, Flowers, Tears
The best portion of a good man’s life: his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
—William Wordsworth
Worse than idle is compassion if it ends in tears and sighs.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Idleness
Sweet childish days, that were as long
As twenty days are now.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Childhood
Happier of happy though I be, like them I cannot take possession of the sky, mount with a thoughtless impulse, and wheel there, one of a mighty multitude whose way and motion is a harmony and dance magnificent.
—William Wordsworth
Topics: Birds
Our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal silence.
—William Wordsworth
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