William Wordsworth

1770–1850 · English Romantic poet · Poet Laureate 1843–1850

Born at Cockermouth in Cumberland on 7 April 1770, Wordsworth helped launch the Romantic age in English poetry with Lyrical Ballads (1798), written jointly with Samuel Taylor Coleridge — a volume that traded eighteenth-century poetic diction for the ordinary speech of ordinary people. “Tintern Abbey” was the last thing he added to it, composed in his head on a July walking tour and written down only when he reached Bristol. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1843 and died at Rydal Mount on 23 April 1850.

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“That best portion of a good man's life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love”

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