Born in West Cumberland, England, in 1770, William Wordsworth was educated at a local school in Hawkshead in the heart of the English Lake District, and later at St. John’s College, Cambridge. In 1791 he traveled to France, where he became an ardent advocate of the French Revolution, then in its earliest and most idealistic stages. He also became romantically involved with a Frenchwoman, Annette Vallon, who bore him an illegitimate daughter. They planned to wed, but lack of money forced Wordsworth to return to England in December 1792. Guilt over the separation and disillusionment with the direction that the Revolution had taken drove Wordsworth to the brink of an emotional breakdown. Turning to poetry as an escape, he published Descriptive Sketches (1793), which recounts his tour of the Swiss Alps. In 1795 Wordsworth received a legacy from a friend that enabled him to pursue a career as a poet; he also met Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Born in Devonshire in 1772, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge. He was a voracious reader, devouring libraries of books, and was more a philosopher than a poet. Oppressed by debt and despondent over a brother’s death, he dropped out of Cambridge in his third year of college, served briefly in a cavalry regiment, and then met Wordsworth.
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