William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was an English poet. He was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, in the English Lake District. His mother died when he was eight, and his father died when he was fourteen. Wordsworth first attended Hawkshead Grammar School in Westmorland, a boarding school that emphasized the teaching of mathematics and classics. He later attended Cambridge University, spending four months in 1790 on a walking tour across Europe. While in France, he became a fervent republican sympathizer.

Wordsworth published his first works of poetry in 1793, including Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk. He would later publish, with the help of his friend Samuel Coleridge, the Lyrical Ballads. In the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth declared that the book's object was "to choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them... in a selection of language really used by men, tracing in them the primary laws of our nature."