1770-1850 · English Romantic poet and Poet Laureate, author of The Prelude
About William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born at Cockermouth in Cumberland and became, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a founder of English Romantic poetry. Their joint collection Lyrical Ballads (1798) ended with this poem. Wordsworth spent most of his life in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy and later his family, wrote the long autobiographical poem The Prelude, and was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death.
“Five years have passed; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a sweet inland murmur.”
“And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.”
Tintern Abbey, as the poem is usually called, is a meditation in blank verse spoken on the banks of the River Wye a few miles upstream of the ruined Cistercian abbey on the border of England and Wales. Its first title dates it to 13 July 1798, when Wordsworth was on a walking tour with his sister Dorothy, and it was printed that autumn as the last poem in Lyrical Ballads.