Beginning of Essay
William Wordsworth was born April 7, 1770 in the village of Cockermouth, Cumberland, into a comfortable middleclass family with roots firmly planted in Lake County. In 1778, Ann Wordsworth died suddenly, and then, over the Christmas holidays of 1783-1784, John Wor ....

Middle of Essay
.... where he met Michel Beaupuy, a French officer who is spoken of in The Prelude. In France, he also met Annette Vallon, with whom he had an illegitimate child, Caroline. Wordsworth returned to England in 1793 and published An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. During a walking tour that year, Wordsworth journeyed across the Salisbury Plain and to Tintern Abbey, both of which are subjects of later poems. By 1794, he was finally reunited with his sister Dorothy, and in 1775, he met the philosopher William Godwin and the poets Southey and Coleridge. By the end of that year, William and Dorothy went to Racedown Lodge, a place to which Coleridge would b ....