Selected Poems

William Wordsworth was born in 1770. In 1798, with Coleridge, he published Lyrical Ballads and that work’s famous preface is now taken as a key Romantic manifesto. In it Wordsworth argues for everyday subjects and an unornamented diction. Shortly after, in poems like Resolution and Independence and Intimations of Immortality , a childlike responsiveness to Nature’s moral teachings is proposed as an ideal. Most of the poems of Wordsworth’s great middle period are set in the Lake District, where he lived most of his adult life. In his youth, Wordsworth was a vehement republican (his ideas formed by early contact with the French Revolution) but with fame and middle-age he drifted gradually into the conservatism and self-parody that were much ridiculed in his later years. He died in 1850.