Although we know him as one of the greatest English poets, William Wordsworth might not have become a poet at all without the experience of personal and historical catastrophe in his youth. This text connects the accidents of Wordsworth's life with the originality of his works, tracking the impulses that turned him to poetry after the death of his parents and during his years as an enthusiastic disciple of the French Revolution. From these events Wordsworth developed a strong sympathy with political idealism and with the outcast and the dispossessed. The text argues that this sympathy formed the deepest motive of Wordsworth's writings of the 1790s. For example, David Bromwich sees "The Old Cumberland Beggar" as "a radical act of human solidarity" that was key to Wordsworth's development as a poet. Wordsworth's ethical act of attention to the old beggar and others not only crystallized his faith in the power of the imagination to preserve human nature, but also originated the idea of personal consciousness so crucial to modern poetry.