Title: William Wordsworth, the father of Romanticism | TheNiche
Headings: William Wordsworth, the father of Romanticism
William Wordsworth, the father of Romanticism
By Lechi Eke

Content: However, the father of the Romantic Movement was a respectable man. Scottish poet and playwright, Joanna Bells, in 1837, wrote of her long acquaintance with Wordsworth, “He looks like a man that one must not speak to unless one has some sensible thing to say.” Wordsworth received two separate honorary doctorate degrees from Universities of Durham and Oxford in 1838/39 respectively. In 1842, he was awarded a Civil List pension of 300 pounds a year. And upon Robert Southey’s death in 1843, the British Prime Minister, Robert Peel, appointed him the Poet Laureate which he protested of but was promised that he would be exempted from writing official verses by reason of his age. However, when he lost his first daughter, Dora, by his wife Mary, he became depressed and stopped writing altogether. Dora died at 42 in 1847. Wordsworth became depressed and died of “aggravated case of pleurisy” three years later in 1850. Wordsworth’s magnum opus (his masterpiece) is considered to be The Prelude, published by his wife, Mary, in the year of his death, months after he expired. It was a kind of autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge.