William Wordsworth Biographical Essay
William Wordsworth Biographical EssayA Biographical Essay on the Life of William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth, a famous poet of the Romantic Period, wrote a great deal of poetry that was inspired by his lifestyle. Wordsworth’s fond love of nature, unusual childhood, and numerous influential relationships with others all played large roles in the poems that he produced.
William lost both his mother and his father at a fairly young age. He spent much of his childhood in boarding schools, which he seemed to love, and staying with his surviving relatives, which he did not enjoy. At the age of 8, William lost his mother, Ann, and at 13 years old, William lost his father, John. Before William’s parents died, he was taught well. His mother taught him to read at an early age and his father made him learn Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope by heart. Ann’s death had a huge effect on the whole family. William described the event as a “vicious blow,” and the whole family was supposedly torn apart from the tragedy. Some critics have linked William’s maternal loss to his possible use of Nature as a “surrogate mother” in the way that he displayed Nature as something that he lived for and that possibly kept him alive. John was a prominent lawyer of Cockermouth, England. He was however, hated and feared by much of the town because many people despised some of his clients. Although William usually escaped those feelings by taking in the scenes of the gardens in Cockermouth, the hatred supposedly came back to haunt all of the Wordsworth children by receiving criticism from residents of Cockermouth.
Once Ann died, William’s state of parental guidance began to change. In May 1779, William began attending Hawkshead Boarding School. His years at Hawkshead were described as reasonably happy because William Taylor, the headmaster at Hawkshead, was a poetry lover and the boys at Hawkshead got a lot of freedom outside of school. William lived with a woman named Ann Tyson while attending Hawkshead. Ann was able to act somewhat like a mother towards William and did a great deal of encouraging William’s love of nature in the Lake District area. Holidays were the worst for William because he had to live with his money-conscious uncles and cruel parents of his mother in Penrith, England. William loved the town of Penrith because of its beauty but hated spending time in the Cookson household so much that at one time he had a desire to commit suicide.
Wordsworth was always fond of nature, and most of his most successful poems were based on nature. Generations of his family were all landowners, so loving a simple country life tended to run in the family. One critic, Matthew Arnold, felt that Wordsworth’s powerful writing connected with his love for nature is what made his poetry...
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