He famously said that a poet should be ‘a man speaking to men’ in other words they should get down from their pedestal, and instead of writing in high-flown poetic diction, they should aim to express ‘our elementary feelings’ by talking about down-to-earth subjects with characters and images drawn from everyday experience.Īnd the book was a bit of a slow burn, it was mostly ignored or ridiculed when it was first published, but over time it has been hugely influential on the way we have written poetry and thought about it for the last two centuries. Or what Wordsworth called ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’, in his preface to Lyrical Ballads. So in the 18th, English poetry had become more and more ornate, archaic, artificial and conventional, full of witty turns of phrase and clever classical allusions. The book was a self conscious effort to break with the past, to simplify the language of poetry and to get back to what they considered its roots. He claimed to have written it entirely in his head, while he was walking back from Tintern Abbey to Bristol, my current home town, and wrote it down when he arrived in Bristol.Īnd he added it as the final poem in the manuscript of Lyrical Ballads, the book he co-authored with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and which is generally credited as being the beginning of modern poetry. This poem was published in 1798, fairly early on in Wordsworth’s career. The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,Īnd what perceive well pleased to recognize Therefore am I stillįrom this green earth of all the mighty world Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,Īnd the blue sky, and in the mind of man,Īll thinking things, all objects of all thought,Īnd rolls through all things. Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power Of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes Have followed, for such loss, I would believe, Unborrowed from the eye.-That time is past,įaint I, nor mourn nor murmur: other gifts Their colours and their forms, were then to me The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798
From Lines Written a few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,
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