Wordsworth and Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth was shaped by the Lake District and by his connection with nature. His collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge led to the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798. The 1800 edition included Wordsworth’s Preface, regarded as a manifesto of English Romanticism. Wordsworth focused on ordinary life, common people, and nature; Coleridge focused on the supernatural and mystery. Wordsworth rejected artificial poetic diction and favoured simple language suited to humble rural life. He described the poet as “a man speaking to men,” distinguished by greater sensibility and imagination.
Nature and poetic creation
Wordsworth presents humanity and nature as deeply connected. Nature is a living presence that can comfort people and help shape their moral character. Poetry begins with powerful feeling, but it is composed through recollection in tranquility: an experience is remembered later in a calm state, and memory revives its emotion. The “inward eye” is central to this process.
Daffodils
- In Daffodils (I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud), the speaker sees golden flowers beside a lake. The poem connects human feeling with nature through reverse personification: the speaker is compared to a cloud, while the flowers are described as a dancing crowd. Later, in solitude, the remembered scene appears to the speaker’s inward eye. This recollection turns loneliness into joy, and the speaker’s heart seems to dance with the daffodils.