William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770–1850), born in the rugged Lake District of northwest England, had his early worldview galvanized by a walking tour through Revolutionary France in 1790 ('Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!'). Settling in Grasmere with his devoted sister Dorothy Wordsworth, he entered a historic collaborative partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

In 1798, they published Lyrical Ballads, whose revolutionary 1800 Preface discarded artificial aristocratic poetic diction in favor of 'the language really used by men', celebrating common rustic folk, daffodils, and the spiritual transcendence of nature. His spiritual autobiographical masterpiece, The Prelude (published posthumously in 1850), traced the growth of a poet's mind, establishing Wordsworth as the high priest of nature and Poet Laureate of Great Britain from 1843 until his death.