William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Anonymous portrait of Wordsworth, c. 1840-50
Wordsworth in 1798, about the time he began The Prelude.
Dove Cottage (Town End, Grasmere) – home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1799–1808; home of Thomas De Quincey, 1809–1820
Rydal Mount – home to Wordsworth 1813–1850. Hundreds of visitors came here to see him over the years
Romantic poetry is the poetry of the Romantic era, an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. It involved a reaction against prevailing Enlightenment ideas of the 18th century, and lasted approximately from 1800 to 1850. Romantic poets rebelled against the style of poetry from the eighteenth century which was based around epics, odes, satires, elegies, epistles and songs.
The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Edouard Fournier (1889); the group members, from left to right, are Trelawny, Hunt and Byron
In the Western cultural context, romanticism substantially contributed to the idea of what a real poet should look like. An idealized statue of a Czech man Karel Hynek Mácha (in Petřín Park, Prague) represents him as a slim, tender and perhaps unhealthy boy. However, he had in reality a strong, robust and muscular body. He was the head(literal) of the Romantic Poetry Age or the Age of Romantic Poetry.
