April 7 - William Wordsworth

Poet William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cumberland, in the Lake District of England. He lost his mother at age 8 and five years later he lost his father. Before finishing studies at Cambridge, he made a walking tour of France during the Revolution that fostered his interest in and sympathy for the life, difficulties and speech of the "common man." His poetry reflected these concerns, evident in Lyrical Ballads (1798), a revolutionary collection by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom he had met in 1795. It marked the beginning of the Romantic movement in English literature. The preface to the 1800 edition was a major statement of the poet’s craft, his place in the world and his emphasis on common speech in an era that valued epic poetry and Neoclassicism. The collection ends with “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” a pantheistic, blank verse conversation with his beloved sister, declaring “that Nature never did
betray / The heart that loved her.”