His first collections of poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches -published in 1793-provided evidence of his love for Swiss, Italian, and French landscapes. Even in his youth, he enjoyed long walks in nature, and went on several hiking tours, both at home and abroad. He published his first poem, a sonnet, in 1787, the same year he started reading for a BA degree at Cambridge University. It was here that he met his future wife, Mary Hutchinson, as they were at school together. His mother, Ann Cookson, taught him to, and he spent a lot of time with his maternal grandparents in Penrith, a civil parish in Cumbia, on the outskirts of the Lake District. William’s father, John Wordsworth, was frequently away on business but encouraged his son to memorize works by Shakespeare, Milton, and Spenser. His sister Dorothy, who also wrote poetry, was born in 1771, and the pair maintained a deep emotional bond throughout their lifetime. William Wordsworth was born in the Lake District in northwestern England in 1770. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is a typical Romantic poem as it focuses on the inner state of the individual-in this instance, an individual who has a mystical attachment to the natural world and longs for a simpler, more innocent time when rural England was unspoiled. The lyric poem, which is spoken in the first person, was a popular choice-it allowed poets the freedom to express their feelings directly and put forward the idea that we are creatures of the imagination, not merely cogs in the wheel of society. The Romantic poets felt that fresh literary forms were needed to capture the new, rebellious spirit of the age. The Industrial Revolution was characterized by mechanization and mass production, which made the country’s economy more efficient but led to an increase in urbanization and exploitative, sometimes dehumanizing working conditions.Īt the same time, France and the United States were in the throes of political revolution, and radical new ideas were everywhere-liberal politics and an early understanding of human rights were taking hold. Wordsworth also wrote the poem partly as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution-a phenomenon that changed the socio-economic landscape of Britain for good. The poem, considered one of the finest examples of English Romanticism, was inspired by a walk he took around Glencoyne Bay in the Lake District with his sister, Dorothy, in 1802, as well as an entry Dorothy made in her journal, which speaks of a “long belt” of daffodils on the shores of a lake near Grasmere.
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