2. William Wordsworth was
born on April 17, 1770, just
outside the Lake District in the
quaint market town of
COCKERMOUTH, GREAT
BRITAIN . He was a major
Romantic Poet who, with Samuel
Taylor Coleridge helped to launch
the romantic age in English
literature with the 1798 joint
publication Lyrical ballads.
4. Wordsworth's father, although frequently away from
home on business, encouraged him to read,
Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser.
After the death of his mother, in 1778,
Wordsworth's father sent him to Hawkshead
Grammar School in Lancashire and Dorothy to live
with relatives in Yorkshire
5. The fine Georgian home has been restored and refurnished to its original
6. The Savoie region of the Alps, through which Wordsworth and Jones
travelled in the summer of 1791
7. Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion
recollected in tranquility." A fourth and final edition of Lyrical
Ballads was published in 1805.
In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads", which is called the "manifesto" of
English Romantic criticism, Wordsworth calls his poems
"experimental."
Wordsworth and Coleridge produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an
important work in the English Romantic movement.
One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was
published in the work, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner”.
8.
9. “thought long and deeply.”
vivid, direct images and descriptions.
lyrical blank verse
10. I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
5 Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
10 Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
15 A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed---and gazed---but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
20 In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.