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William Wordsworth was born on April 7th, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Young William's parents, John and Ann, died during his boyhood. Raised amid the mountains of Cumberland alongside the River Derwent, Wordworth grew up in a rustic society, and spent a great deal of his time playing outdoors, in what he would later remember as a pure communion with nature. In the early 1790s William lived for a time in France, then in the grip …

…younger Romantics whose work he had inspired. Byron--the only important poet to become more popular than Wordsworth during Wordsworth's lifetime--in particular saw him as a kind of sell-out, writing in his sardonic preface to Don Juan that the once-liberal Wordsworth had "turned out a Tory" at last. The last decades of Wordsworth's life, however, were spent as Poet Laureate of England, and until his death he was widely considered the most important author in England.