Page 172 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Unit 9: Daffodils by William Wordsworth

Self Assessment Notes

State true or false:
1. William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1760.
2. The poet has compared himself to a floating cloud in the poem Daffodils.

3. William Wordsworth compares the daffodils with the sky in the poem Daffodils.
4. “Daffodils” is a lyric poem focusing on the poet’s response to the beauty of nature.
5. In 1790 William Wordsworth together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the famous
Lyrical Ballads.
6. Wordsworth’s most famous work, The Prelude (1850), is considered by many to be the
crowning achievement of English romanticism.

9.6 Summary

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet
who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English
literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William
Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth,
Cumberland – part of the scenic region in northwest England, the Lake District. His sister,
the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the
following year, and the two were baptised together.
In November 1791, Wordsworth visited Revolutionary France and became enthralled with
the Republican movement. He fell in love with a French woman, Annette Vallon, who in
1792 gave birth to their child, Caroline.

In his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”, which is called the “manifesto” of English Romantic
criticism, Wordsworth calls his poems “experimental.” The year 1793 saw Wordsworth’s
first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He
received a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing
poetry.

From 1795 to 1797, he wrote his only play, The Borderers, a verse tragedy set during the
reign of King Henry III of England when Englishmen of the North Country were in conflict
with Scottish rovers.
During the harsh winter of 1798–99, Wordsworth lived with Dorothy in Goslar, and,
despite extreme stress and loneliness, he began work on an autobiographical piece later
titled The Prelude. He wrote a number of famous poems, including “The Lucy poems”.
Wordsworth married a childhood friend, Mary Hutchinson. Dorothy continued to live
with the couple and grew close to Mary.
Wordsworth had for years been making plans to write a long philosophical poem in three
parts, which he intended to call The Recluse. He had in 1798–99 started an autobiographical
poem, which he never named but called the “poem to Coleridge”, which would serve as
an appendix to The Recluse. In 1804, he began expanding this autobiographical work,
having decided to make it a prologue rather than an appendix to the larger work he
planned.

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