He was born in the Lake District
(natural beauty that with the grand tour inspired "Nature poets"). that captured him with its sights, sounds and smells.
He had a regular education (Cambridge).
He travelled to France.
There he knew the Revolution and a girl, Annette Vallon,
he had a daughter. He turned to England
because of lack of money à nervous
He lived with his sister, Dorothy, best friend and supporter. He
became friend of Coleridge (more fantastic )and
worked with him thanks to his love for nature and ordinary subjects.
He collected a lot of poems in Lyrical Ballads (1789),
added of a Preface on 1800 that was the manifesto of Romantic movement in Britain.
In the Preface he explains his ideas about poetry.
The main setting and inspiration of his poems was nature.
He makes children and childhood the subjects of his poems ( they were closer to nature than men).
He married Mary Hutchiston and he had 5
children, his brother drew and two children died à decline
of his creative powers.
He was increasingly conservative. Lyrical Ballads are composed by
Tintern Abbey, I wandered lonely as a cloud, Lucy
poems, She dwelt among the untrodden
ways + the Preface.
The Preface was his response to the general crisis in the social and
literary of England.
His ideas are:
-choice of an ordinary subjects and language;
-poet like "man speaking to man", he has more imagination than
- poetry like "spontaneous owerflow
of powerful feelings emotions recollected in tranquillity".
-countryside, opposed to city, is solitary and silent à pleasure.
-source of inspiration, he describes what the relationship
between man and nature à he is part
-nature as life-force: god is nature but he has not pantheistic
His poetry is based on "emotion recollected in tranquillity", he
bases his poetry on memory, he analyses past, present and future at the same
time ( the pleasure of the present will be remembered
in the future).