WW
1770–1850
William Wordsworth
Lake poet who argued that ordinary speech and remembered childhood could remake poetry. Nature, for him, is a teacher of the mind.
Reoriented English poetry toward memory, landscape, and the growth of a poet’s mind.
Primary works
Poetry collection · 1798
Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth
With Coleridge, Wordsworth proposes poems in the language of ordinary people and subjects drawn from common life. Feeling is revalued as knowledge.
Romantic lyric
Autobiographical poem · 1850
The Prelude
William Wordsworth
A long poem on the growth of a poet’s mind: Lake childhood, Cambridge, revolutionary hope, and the return to nature as a moral home.
Romantic epic