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William Wordsworth   (1770-1850)

LINKS

Complete Poetical Works (1881)
http://www.bartleby.com/index.html

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.

The Poems of Lyrical Ballads.
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.

The 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 and information on the context in which they appear.

Voice of the Shuttle: Romantic Literature
http://humanitas.ucsb.edu/shuttle/eng-rom.html#authors

The best source of online information on the romantics, this site allows you to look at Wordsworth e-texts, biographies, visual resources, bibliographies of criticism, and scholarly articles. Just scroll down the alphabetical list to link to the Web's prime sites devoted to William Wordsworth.

BIOGRAPHY
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born in Cockermouth in the Lake District of northern England. Wordsworth's mother died when he was eight, and his father died five years later, causing Wordsworth to be separated from his sister, to whom he was very close. In 1787, he entered St. John's College, Cambridge, the same year he published his first sonnet. Along with poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, a work which marks the beginning of the English Romantic movement. While traveling in France in 1790, Wordsworth had an affair with Annette Vallon that resulted in the birth of a daughter. His tour of France made him an ardent defender of the French Revolution and kindled his sympathies for the plight of the common person.

Wordsworth produced his most important works during the years 1797-1808, a period during which he was mainly settled in England, reunited with his sister, and inspired by a feeling of close contact with nature. His second volume of poetry, Poems, in Two Volumes, appeared in 1807, and though he completed the autobiographical poem "The Prelude" in 1805, it was not published until 1850, after Wordsworth's death. As he grew older, Wordsworth grew increasingly conservative. While he continued to write prolifically, little of his of his later work attained the heights of the earlier work.



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