• born in Cumberland, England, part of the scenic region in northwest England• second of five children

Hawkshead Grammar School, Lancashire

Dame Berkitt’s School

• graduated with a B.A in (1791)

• debut in The European Magazine (’87)

• spent holidays on walking tours

• visited France in 1790 and became enthralled with the Republican movement

• Annette Vallon: “Adieu, mon ami…Aime toujours ta petite fille et ton Annette qui t’embrasse mil fois sur la bouche, sur les yeux…Adieu, je t’aime pour la vie.”

External influences

Reign of Terror William Godwin

• Wordsworth formed a softer, more emotional understanding of the world

Poetry is a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings…emotion recollected in tranquillity."

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shineAnd twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending lineAlong the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but theyOut-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,In such a jocund company:

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thoughtWhat wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lieIn vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eyeWhich is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,And dances with the daffodils.

• “the feeling gives importance to action and situation and not the action and situation to the feeling”

• the essential material of poems is the feelings of the author - free from rules and “artful manipulation of means of foreseen ends”

•written in the language of the common man

• the greatness of nature

• power of the human mind

The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. - Great God! I'd rather beA Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.