Wordsworth may have been partially eclipsed by his fellow Romantics, but his life was far from dull

Between 1798 and 1807 William Wordsworth revolutionised English poetry, giving voice to the marginalised in poems such as ‘The Idiot Boy’ and anticipating modern psychology in his exploration of childhood. Today, his ability to articulate the connection between man and nature can still bring us up short, as in these lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’:

… And I have felt,A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublimeOf 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…

After 1807 Wordsworth experienced what Jonathan Bate, in one of two biographies that mark the 250th anniversary of the poet’s birth, calls ‘the longest, dullest decline in literary history’. This is a key biographical challenge: how to write about someone who, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, had ‘written longer than he was inspired’ without boring the reader and overshadowing Wordsworth’s achievement.