William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Abstract

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was early left by the deaths of his parents in the care of uncles. He was educated at Cambridge. In 1791 he visited France, and was stirred to great enthusiasm for the Revolution, embracing a Rousseauistic belief in the virtues of “the people.” But the wars of the Revolution and England’s participation in them, as well as the “excesses” of the Terror, cooled his enthusiasm as it had that of so many of his generation, until he had clearly become a conservative in his writings after about 1804. Many young admirers regarded his conversion to the established powers as fully evident when he took the post of stamp distributor. His emotional ties were to the countryside of the Lake District, where he spent so much of his life. As an old man, in 1843, on the death of Southey, he became Poet Laureate.