Wordsworth , William , 1770-1850 , poet

William Wordsworth was born in the Lake District in 1770. He was educated at Hawkshead grammar school, and St John's College, Cambridge University. In 1795 he moved, with his sister Dorothy, to Alfoxden House near Bristol, where they met Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. Wordsworth and Southey embarked on a partnership which was to change the former's style of poetry from long poems of social protest to the short lyrical and dramatic poems for which he is best known. In 1798 Coleridge and Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads. The Wordsworths and Coleridge moved to the Lake District, the former two moving into Dove Cottage in Ambleside. William married his childhood companion, Mary Hutchinson in 1802. He was made Poet Laureate in 1843, a post which he held until his death in 1850.