William Wordsworth (1770–1850) Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, The World Is Too Much with Us LINKS Complete Poetical Works (1881) http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/wordsworth/ Part of the Bartleby Archive created and maintained at Columbia University, this site contains the text of Wordsworth's Complete Poetical Works which was first published in 1888. Lyrical Ballads Hypertext Project—Wordsworth http://is.dal.ca/~tetro/ww2/welcome.html This site provides a "scholarly electronic edition" of Wordsworth's poems which makes it possible to examine different versions of Wordsworth's poems as they appeared throughout his life. Web Concordance—Lyrical Ballads—Wordsworth http://www.dundee.ac.uk/English/wics/lballads/framconc.htm This site provides the text of the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads along with a concordance, an alphabetical index of the words in this volume along with information on the context in which they appear. BIOGRAPHY William Wordsworth (1770–1850) Born in Cockermouth in the Lake District of England, Wordsworth was educated at Cambridge. During a summer tour in France in 1790, Wordsworth had an affair with Annette Vallon that resulted in the birth of a daughter. The tour also made of Wordsworth an ardent defender of the French Revolution of 1789 and kindled his sympathies for the plight of the common person. Wordsworth's acquaintance with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1795 began a close friendship that led to the collaborative publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Wordsworth supplied a celebrated preface to the second edition in 1800, in which he announced himself a nature poet of pantheistic leanings, committed to democratic equality and the language of common people. He finished The Prelude in 1805, but it was not published until after his death. As he grew older, Wordsworth grew increasingly conservative and, while he continued to write prolifically, little that he wrote during the last decades of his life attained the heights of his earlier work. In 1843, he was appointed poet laureate.