William Wordsworth

1770–1850 · England

Enlightenment1 work in canonPoetry

Biography

English Romantic poet whose 1798 Lyrical Ballads, co-authored with Coleridge, marked the beginning of the Romantic movement in English literature. Wordsworth aimed to write in 'the real language of men' about ordinary subjects — a revolutionary departure from the formal diction of his Augustan predecessors. He was named Poet Laureate in 1843, by which point his radicalism had long since cooled into conservative Anglicanism.

Works in Canon (1)