No singular figure did so much to develop the ethos, poetic style, and emergent philosophy of English Romanticism as the Lake District poet, William Wordsworth.

The greatest sources for the details of his life are, first, his great autobiographical poem, The Prelude, and second, his sister Dorothy’s wonderful diaries, known to posterity as The Grasmere Journals.

Born on April 7th in 1770, Wordsworth’s most fecund years map squarely over the Age of Napoleon Bonaparte, a fitting timeline, since in many ways, English Romanticism came into being as a reaction to the excitement and uncertainty, indeed the high romance, of the French Revolution.

If there is a term of art which most aptly expresses the motto of Wordsworth’s poetic project, it is “natural piety,” a phrase which concludes his marvelous short poem, “My Heart Leaps Up,” (1808). Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were intrepid walkers, and rambled over the Lake District in England for tens of miles at a time, engaged in small talk, keen observation of local flora and fauna, and in contemplation of the great philosophical, spiritual, and literary matters of their, or any, age.

Wordsworth and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge made a famous pair of literary friends. Having met in 1795, they jointly published their collection, Lyrical Ballads, in 1798.

He is best remembered for his short lyrics and for a pair of long poems, known affectionately as “Tintern Abbey,” and the “Intimations Ode.”

William Wordsworth died on April 23, 1850. This was two-hundred and thirty-four years to the day after the death of William Shakespeare.