Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere

Abstract

William Wordsworth’s name is ineluctably associated with the English Lake District, the place where he spent his childhood and adolescence, and to which he returned on a permanent basis in December 1799. Settling into Dove Cottage, Grasmere, with his sister Dorothy, Wordsworth determined to make his home and his poetic career among the lakes and mountains that had first awakened and nourished his childhood imagination. His is a poetry of place, rooted not only in a concrete awareness of geographic location, but also in the significance that attaches to particular places as a result of childhood memory.1