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    Interesting Facts About William Wordsworth

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    William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, England. He attended the same school as Fletcher Christian and went on long walks through the English Lakes, sometimes walking up to 180,000 miles total. One of his most famous poems, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", was inspired by daffodils Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy saw during a walk in 1802. Though often attributed solely to Wordsworth, some lines were actually written by his wife Mary Hutchinson. Wordsworth died in 1850 at the age of 80, having spent the last years of his life as the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

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    Interesting Facts About William Wordsworth

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    William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, England. He attended the same school as Fletcher Christian and went on long walks through the English Lakes, sometimes walking up to 180,000 miles total. One of his most famous poems, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", was inspired by daffodils Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy saw during a walk in 1802. Though often attributed solely to Wordsworth, some lines were actually written by his wife Mary Hutchinson. Wordsworth died in 1850 at the age of 80, having spent the last years of his life as the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

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    Interesting Facts about William Wordsworth

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    William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, England. He attended the same school as Fletcher Christian and went on long walks through the English Lakes, sometimes walking up to 180,000 miles total. One of his most famous poems, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", was inspired by daffodils Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy saw during a walk in 1802. Though often attributed solely to Wordsworth, some lines were actually written by his wife Mary Hutchinson. Wordsworth died in 1850 at the age of 80, having spent the last years of his life as the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

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    117 views3 pages

    Interesting Facts About William Wordsworth

    Uploaded by

    badshah9khan-3
    William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in Cockermouth, England. He attended the same school as Fletcher Christian and went on long walks through the English Lakes, sometimes walking up to 180,000 miles total. One of his most famous poems, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", was inspired by daffodils Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy saw during a walk in 1802. Though often attributed solely to Wordsworth, some lines were actually written by his wife Mary Hutchinson. Wordsworth died in 1850 at the age of 80, having spent the last years of his life as the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

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    Interesting Facts about William Wordsworth

    The life of William Wordsworth told through some intriguing biographical facts

    William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth in the Lake District. He went to

    the same school, the Cockermouth Free School, as Fletcher Christian, the man who would lead

    the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789. Christian was six years senior to Wordsworth.

    Famously, Wordsworth had anosmia. As the poet’s nephew ​wrote in his ​Memoirs of William

    Wordsworth,​ ‘With regard to ​fragrance​, Mr. Wordsworth spoke from the testimony of ​others: ​he

    himself had ​no sense of smell​. The single instance of his enjoying such a perception, which is

    recorded of him in Southey’s life, was, in fact, imaginary. The incident occurred at Racedown,

    when he was walking with Miss H––, who coming suddenly upon a parterre of sweet flowers,

    expressed her pleasure at their fragrance, – a pleasure which he caught from her lips, and then

    fancied to be his own.’

    Wordsworth was a keen walker among the Lakes where he lived for much of his life – as was his

    friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who collaborated with him on the landmark 1798 volume

    ​ homas De Quincey once estimated that Wordsworth walked up to 180,000


    Lyrical Ballads. T

    miles in his whole life.

    To the right is a picture of the manuscript for Wordsworth’s best-known poem. It is often

    referred to (erroneously, if we’re being pedantic) as ‘The Daffodils’ or ‘Daffodils’, but in fact it

    had no title and is technically known only by its first line, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. It

    didn’t appear in the famous ​Lyrical Ballads – it was written a few years after that volume had

    been published. On 15 April 1802, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were walking (there’s a
    surprise) around Glencoyne Bay in Ullswater when they encountered, in the words of Dorothy’s

    journal, a ‘long belt’ of daffodils. As ​Dorothy wrote​, ‘we saw a few daffodils close to the water

    side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore & that the little colony had so sprung

    up – But as we went along there were more & yet more & at last under the boughs of the trees,

    we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country

    turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about &

    about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness & the rest

    tossed and reeled and danced & seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon

    them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever dancing ever changing.’ The influence of this

    passage from Dorothy’s journal can be seen in Wordsworth’s poem, which we’ve ​analysed

    here​.

    Who wrote the following lines? ‘They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of

    solitude.’ They come from ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, but they weren’t written by

    Wordsworth – his wife, Mary Hutchinson, contributed them, ​as Wordsworth himself

    confirmed​. There is ​no evidence to support the oft-repeated claim that Wordsworth originally

    had ‘I wandered lonely as a cow’ until Dorothy advised him to alter it to ‘I wandered lonely as a

    cloud’, though it’s a nice story: the myth ​may have originated in Conrad Aiken’s 1952 novel

    Ushant​.

    ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ first appeared in print in 1807 in Wordsworth’s ​Poems in Two

    Volumes​, which received largely negative reviews. A young Byron described it as ‘puerile’. It

    was not, perhaps, the worst review Wordsworth’s work ever received: Francis Jeffrey’s adverse
    review of Wordsworth’s long poem ​The Excursion began with the devastating sentence, ‘This

    will never do.’ Which, somehow, is worse.

    Wordsworth’s famous preface to the ​Lyrical Ballads​, in which he refers to poetry as ‘the

    spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ that ‘takes its origin from emotion recollected in

    tranquility’, didn’t appear in the original 1798 edition but was first published ​in the 1800 reprint

    (which, for some reason, carried only Wordsworth’s name as author).

    Wordsworth died on 23 April 1850 – just over a fortnight after his eightieth birthday, and on the

    anniversary of Shakespeare’s death some 234 years before. For the last seven years of his life he

    was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, though he wrote no official verses during this time.

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