Juliet Barker

On the 250th anniversary of his birth, Wordsworth’s verse still transports us to the landscapes that inspired him, even if we can’t be there in person...

HE WASN’T actually born in the Lakes, rather just outside them in the busy market town of Cockermouth. Yet the name William Wordsworth is synonymous with one of Britain’s most beautiful regions, thanks to the enduring appeal of his poetry. Today, on the 250th anniversary of the great man’s birth, the Lakes are out of bounds to most of us, affected by the ongoing coronavirus lockdown.

But wherever we are, nothing can stop us reading his poetry and vicariously enjoying the majesty of the Lake District.

Wordsworth spent much of his youth around the area, gaining inspiration from the fells and valleys, and later settled in the pretty Cumbrian village of Grasmere. The landscape, the people and their traditions fired his poetry.

That’s one of the reasons he remains so relevant today. If it wasn’t for lockdown, you could quite literally walk in his footsteps, see the places he lived, worked and wrote about.

So even from afar we can enjoy his evocations of nature and working people.

Wordworth’s father was a lawyer and land agent for the Lowthers, Cumbrian landowners and the Earls

of Lonsdale, and he enjoyed a comfortable early glorious upbringing. William was the second of five happy siblings. But his mother, Anne, passed away when he was just eight years old. His devastated father, John, died five years later and, now orphaned, the children were split up.

The four boys, including William, went to a boarding school in Hawkshead in the Lakes, while their sister Dorothy, a year younger than William and his inseparable childhood companion, was sent away to relatives in Halifax.

The siblings would occasionally meet at their grandparents in Penrith but it was an unhappy time.

Later, Dorothy came to live with theWordsworths and remained a devoted companion to her brother. A woman of exceptional intellect and creativity in her own right, she sacrificed everything to support him.

Many said Dorothy inspired him to write because she had the same kind of emotional response.When he composed aloud, often while out walking – “bumming and booing about” as the local people liked to call it – she would follow behind him and take down notes.

He called her “sister of my soul” and would later say with great passion: “She made me a poet. She gave me eyes, she gave me ears.”

Wordsworth started writing poetry early, when still at school. Even then, his inspiration was the landscape around him. But it was not until later that he developed his own unique and wonderful lyrical expression. He started to use the vocabulary of the day-to-day.

Lyrical Ballads, the collection he published in 1798 when he was 28 with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is considered to mark the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. It made him famous.

But it also marked a move away from poetry for the elite and the assumption, which Wordsworth vehemently contested, that poetry was for the rich, not ordinary folk who, in the orthodoxy of the day, had little use for, or understanding, of it. Wordsworth set out to prove that wrong. And he succeeded. But fame did leaving Cambridge Un France, much enthused b and lived in Orleans and valley, for almost a year. It was an important p emotional development. ent country and sta childhood. But fell in love w whom he ha He had back and ary Fra regarded Englishm between to leave she was p mate child. He stayed their daughter, their lives and sen After visiting them in 18 before he married, he w recalling their meeting. O

‘Why is he still so revered? Well, his emotional, beautifully expressed poetry speaks to your heart’