Guide to the Lakes prose-poem about light, shapes, and textures, about movement and stillness ... It is a paean to a way of life, but also a lament for the inevitability of its passing ... What holds this diversity together is the voice of complete authority, compounded from experience, intense observation, thought, and love. Wordsworth was born in the Lake District and spent much of his life living there. Wordsworth and his friends Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge became known as Lake Poets not only because they lived in this area but also because its landscapes and people inspired their work. By 1810,
William Wordsworth with Annette, Wordsworth married his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy continued to live with the couple and grew close to Mary. The following year Mary gave birth to the first of five children, three of whom predeceased her and William: Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three parts, which he intended to call "The Recluse". In 1798–99 he started an autobiographical poem, which he referred to as the "poem to Coleridge" and which he planned would serve as an appendix to a larger work called "The Recluse". In 1804 he began expanding