William Wordsworth (1770–1850), the father of the Romantic Movement in England, had more influence on English poetry than any other writer since Shakespeare. Before Wordsworth, people for the most part viewed nature as something to be tamed, controlled, and turned to human uses. A tree was something to be chopped down and turned into a house or a boat or a bridge. Wordsworth taught people to look at the tree itself, to see it as a thing of beauty that could inspire elevated emotions.

Wordsworth was born in the English Lake District to parents who both died before he was thirteen years old. In his early childhood, he developed a deep love for the Lake District countryside. Moody but energetic, he loved to take long walks, which were, for him, occasions for absorbing the sights and sounds of the natural world. He attended Cambridge but did not take to academic life. After leaving school in 1791, he went on a walking tour of Europe and then lived for a year in France. There he became a strong supporter of the democratic ideals of the French Revolution. He also had an affair with Annette Vallon, a young French woman who bore him a child. For reasons not entirely clear but probably related to finances and tensions between England and France, Wordsworth returned to his own country without Annette and his child. When the revolution in France degenerated into the Reign of Terror, Wordsworth became disillusioned and despondent. This period of suffering was made bearable by the kind attentions of his gentle sister Dorothy and by the companionship of his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Wordsworth met Coleridge in 1795. Each was extremely impressed with the talents of the other. Living in a cottage in Dorsetshire with Dorothy, Wordsworth visited almost daily with Coleridge, who called his friend "the best poet of the age." Together they walked through the countryside, spoke of poetry and philosophy, and conceived radical new ideas about verse. These ideas would find fruit in Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection of poems that they co-authored. Later editions of this volume contained various versions of Wordsworth's magnificent, controversial Preface, which argues, in keeping with the poet's revolutionary, democratic principles, that poetry should be written not in stilted, flowery, formal language but rather in the voice of the common person. The verse in Lyrical Ballads contains portraits of nature and of ordinary but noble people; it eschews artificial, mechanical devices of style in favor of "a selection of the language actually used by men"; and it records remembered moments of spontaneous emotional transport over which had been thrown "a certain coloring of the imagination."

In 1802, Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, with whom he was to have five children. In 1805 he completed his long masterwork, The Prelude, an autobiographical portrait of the development of a poet from childhood through maturity. This poem was meant to be the introduction to a longer work that was never completed.

The period from 1797 to 1807 saw the creation of Wordsworth's finest poems, most of which dealt with the elevation of the soul through communion with nature. Thereafter, Wordsworth's poetic powers declined as his conservatism, derived from bitterness over the failures of the French Revolution, increased. This conservatism earned him the scorn of younger, more radical poets, including Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Robert Browning, a scorn most famously expressed in Browning's poem "The Lost Leader."

In 1843 Wordsworth accepted the position of poet laureate of England under the condition that he not be required to write occasional or official verse. In his later years, he cared patiently and devotedly for his beloved sister Dorothy, who suffered from senile dementia. When Wordsworth himself died, he was buried in Grasmere Churchyard in the Lake District that he had immortalized in his work.