William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
It was whilst living in Dove Cottage that the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrote much of his greatest poetry and his sister Dorothy kept her Grasmere Journals. In the early nineteenth century their home was frequented by some of British Romanticism's key writers, poets and artists
Wordsworth was born in 1770. He lived for eighty years, produced some of English poetry’s greatest works and influenced future generations of poets. Most of his life was spent in the Lake District. He was born in Cockermouth (a town in the northern Lakes); educated at Hawkshead Grammar school; and spent much of his adult life in Grasmere and Rydal, right in the heart of the Lake District.
Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount in 1850, and is buried, with his family, in Grasmere churchyard. During his life he was witness to great social, political and 
artistic change and his experiences and attitudes are reflected not only in his poetry, but also in letters and prose works.
Place and family were also important to Wordsworth. This is clear in his abiding love of the Lake District and settled domestic life, celebrated in poems such as Home at Grasmere.
Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum & Art Gallery give a unique insight into the way Wordsworth worked: where his ideas came from, his use of notebooks, the making of fair copies and the continuous correction and reworking of poems. Our collection also takes in several of Wordsworth’s friends and contemporaries who made contributions to the artistic and literary life of the period – some are an integral part of Wordsworth’s story; while others help to paint a picture of the atmosphere of the time.
Read key poems by Wordsworth:
A Farewell
A Narrow Girdle of Rough Stones and Crags
Alice Fell
Boat-stealing (an episode from The Prelude)
Composed upon Westminster Bridge
Decay of Piety
Dove Cottage Garden
Elegiac Stanzas
Foresight
Goody Blake, and Harry Gill
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
Ice-skating (an episode from The Prelude)
It is a Beauteous Evening
Lucy Gray
Lines Written in Early Spring
Minstrels
Michael, a pastoral poem
Ode: Intimations of Immortality
Point Rash Judgment
The Prelude, Book First
The Rainbow
The Raven's Nest (an episode from The Prelude)
Remembrance Of Collins Composed Upon The Thames Near Richmond
Repentance - A Pastoral Ballad
Resolution and Independence
The Ruined Cottage
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
She was a Phantom of Delight (written for his wife Mary)
The Solitary Reaper
The Sparrow's Nest
The Sun Has Long Been Set
There was a Boy (an episode from The Prelude)
Three poems on the Celandine
Tintern Abbey
To a Butterfly
To a Sexton
To the Daisy
To the Same Flower
To the Small Celandine
Trapping Woodcocks (an episode from The Prelude)
We Are Seven
Read about Wordsworth's Themes.
Read Mr. Wordsworth (an extract) from The Spirit of the Age, by William Hazlitt.
Read about the the loss of Wordsworth's brother, John in the Earl of Abergavenny disaster.
Read William and Dorothy Wordsworth's response to the George and Sarah Green tragedy of 1808.
