If you’ve ever heard the line ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, ‘Behold her, single in the field’, or heard a tale of ‘Lucy Gray’, you’ve had the pleasure of reading a poem by William Wordsworth. Born in 1770 and living until 1850, William Wordsworth is most famous for launching the Romantic Era of English poetry with a collection of poems called Lyrical Ballads, which he co-wrote with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was Poet Laureate of the UK, an honorary position appointed by the king or queen, and also helped make the Lake District (the northwest English country park where he spent most of his life) a major tourist attraction. While his poetry is a joy to read, the story of how he developed the thinking that informed it is just as interesting. It’s a story of youthful hope and rage that turns into contentment with his life and a determination to be a net positive influence on the world through his writing. The story of Wordsworth should offer a ray of hope to any aspiring writer and provide some comfort in our increasingly-busy modern world.

After graduating from Cambridge University in 1791, Wordsworth went on a walking tour around Europe (a popular trend among young men at the time). This trip both strengthened his love of hiking and meant he found himself in France in the middle of the French Revolution. The young Wordsworth immediately fell in love with the ideals of the revolutionaries (liberty, equality, fraternity) and hoped a similar revolution would break out in the UK. In his twenties, he wanted women to be able to vote and for kings and queens to be abolished.

That day never came, however. The outbreak of war between Britain and France forced Wordsworth to return to the UK, leaving behind a wife and child. Later, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and his subsequent military coup soured Wordsworth’s views on revolution in general. The politically disillusioned Wordsworth returned to the place where he felt comfortable and alive: the Lake District, to live with his sister Dorothy.

Although Wordsworth would no longer be sympathetic to violent revolution, his love of the common people never faltered. Before Wordsworth, the vast majority of literature (or, at least, literature that was considered important) focused on the highest classes in society: kings, princes, lords, warriors, saints. It was also written in a complex language that ordinary people struggled to understand. In the Preface to his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth set out his manifesto: his poetry would focus on ordinary people using ordinary language. Indeed, much of Wordsworth’s poetry recounts the stories of people he met while hiking the Lake District with his sister or folk tales from local villages: a girl who went missing on the moors; a boy who struggled with a learning disability; a woman reaping corn in the field; a homeless man who knocked on his and Dorothy’s door asking for money; a man who claimed to have walked from Britain to India and back. Through his work, Wordsworth proved that the common person deserved to be the subject of literature.

In a way, while he didn’t affect massive sociopolitical change, William Wordsworth did bring the issues of the populace to light. He told their stories in wonderful, yet understandable, language. He strove to produce poetry that strengthened people’s connection to nature. Many of his poems read like an exercise in what we would now call ‘mindfulness’, of being present in the moment and appreciating tiny details in our everyday lives. His assertion that poetry is ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings […] recollected in tranquillity’ posits his work as a kind of journaling. In a way, by writing poetry that was accessible and took the emotions of normal people seriously, William Wordsworth staged his own quiet revolution.