Who Was William Wordsworth? The Poet Who Taught the World to See the Lake District

Every landscape has its interpreter, and the Lake District's is William Wordsworth. He was born here, schooled here, orphaned here; he returned here at the height of his powers and never left; he wrote the poems here – the daffodils, the Prelude, the Tintern lines – that changed English poetry's direction and, along the way, invented much of how the modern world looks at mountains, lakes and childhood. When guests join us in Windermere or Ambleside, they are stepping into Wordsworth's neighbourhood: his homes, his walks, his graves and his views surround us. Here is the life story behind the landscape – the essential primer for any literary traveller to the Lakes.

A Lakeland childhood, brightly lit and quickly darkened

William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, on the Lake District's north-western edge, in the handsome Georgian house on Main Street now kept by the National Trust as Wordsworth House. His father was law agent to the domineering local magnate Sir James Lowther; the house came with the job, and so did trouble – of which more below. William was the second of five children, and his lifelong companion was already beside him in the nursery: his sister Dorothy, born the following year, whose eyes and journals would one day feed his greatest poems.

Then childhood fell apart. His mother died when William was seven; Dorothy was sent away to relatives, and the brothers went to school at Hawkshead, boarding with the kindly Ann Tyson. Five years later their father died too, leaving the children orphaned – and effectively cheated of their inheritance, since Lowther refused for decades to pay the substantial money he owed their father's estate. Yet the Hawkshead years (1779–1787) were, on William's own account, gloriously happy: a half-wild outdoor boyhood of skating on frozen Esthwaite Water, raiding ravens' nests on crags, rowing on moonlit lakes – experiences he would later transfigure in The Prelude into the founding scenes of English autobiography. The little grammar school still stands in Hawkshead village, with his name carved schoolboy-fashion into a desk.

Revolution, France and a secret daughter

Cambridge bored him; France electrified him. Wordsworth crossed to a France in mid-Revolution in 1791, aged 21, and caught fire with republican hope – "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive", he later wrote of that season. He also fell in love: with Annette Vallon, a surgeon's daughter from Blois, who in December 1792 bore his daughter, Caroline. War between Britain and France then slammed the door between them for nearly a decade; Wordsworth's youthful radicalism curdled through the Terror into crisis, and the poet returned home poor, guilty and adrift. He acknowledged and supported Caroline, and in 1802, during the brief peace, walked the beach at Calais with the daughter he barely knew – the meeting behind his tender sonnet beginning "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free". This buried chapter, little known to casual readers, is essential Wordsworth: the great poet of domestic peace built it on early storm.

Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads and the birth of Romanticism

The rescue came through friendship. A small legacy freed Wordsworth to live cheaply with Dorothy, and in the West Country in 1797 they fell into the orbit of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – the most dazzling talker in England. The two poets struck creative sparks off each other daily, and in 1798 published a slim joint volume, Lyrical Ballads – opening with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and closing with Wordsworth's lines above Tintern Abbey – that quietly began the English Romantic movement: poetry in "the real language of men", about common lives and the mind's converse with nature. The 1800 edition added Wordsworth's fighting Preface, the movement's manifesto. He was thirty, and had found his voice; now he needed his place.

Dove Cottage and the golden decade

In December 1799, William and Dorothy walked into the Vale of Grasmere and rented a tiny former inn at Town End – Dove Cottage – for eight pounds a year. The decade that followed is one of the most concentrated bursts of genius in literary history: at Dove Cottage Wordsworth wrote much of his greatest poetry – the Immortality Ode, "Resolution and Independence", the Westminster Bridge and "It is a beauteous evening" sonnets, the daffodils poem – while Dorothy kept the luminous Grasmere Journal that recorded their walks, their neighbours and the lakeshore daffodils she described so vividly that her brother turned the entry into the most famous poem in English. In 1802, Lowther's heir finally paid the old family debt, and William could marry: his bride was Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, who bore five children in the cottage's crowded little rooms. The Wordsworth Trust preserves Dove Cottage and its incomparable manuscripts today – details at wordsworth.org.uk.

Rydal Mount: the patriarch of the Lakes

Growing family and growing fame outgrew the cottage. After intermediate Grasmere houses – and the shattering losses of his sailor brother John (drowned 1805) and two of his young children (1812) – Wordsworth moved in 1813 a couple of miles down the valley to Rydal Mount, between Grasmere and Ambleside, his home for his remaining 37 years. There he became an institution: gardening his terraced grounds, receiving pilgrims from across the world (Ralph Waldo Emerson among the Americans), publishing his bestselling Guide to the Lakes, thundering in sonnets against the coming railway, and in 1843 accepting the Poet Laureateship – on the understanding, uniquely honoured, that he would never have to write an official line. Sorrow kept pace with honour: his beloved daughter Dora died in 1847, and the old poet planted a field of daffodils below Rydal Mount in her memory – Dora's Field, golden every spring to this day.

Death, the Prelude, and where to find him now

Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount on 23 April 1850 – Shakespeare's date – aged 80, and was buried, as he wished, beneath the yews he had planted in St Oswald's churchyard, Grasmere; Mary then published the great autobiographical poem he had revised across half a century, giving it the title he never settled: The Prelude. His grave, his cottage, his schoolroom, his birthplace and his daffodil shores all lie within our touring range, and our small-group Wordsworth tours from Windermere and Ambleside – a maximum of seven guests – thread them together with the life story told where it happened. He asked to be remembered as "a teacher or nothing". Come and take the lesson in the original classroom.

This article is part of our Wordsworth guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.