50 Fun Facts About William Wordsworth

Which flowers did William Wordsworth immortalise in I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud after a lakeside walk with his sister?

Daffodils gave the poem its popular nickname, and his wife supplied the two lines he thought its best. A BBC Radio 4 poll in 1995 ranked it the UK's fifth favourite poem.

Which singer alludes to William Wordsworth in The Lakes, a 2020 bonus track about escaping to the Lake District?

Taylor Swift released the song on the deluxe edition of her album Folklore. Its lyrics dream of a quiet retreat near Windermere, far from social media.

What sight in the sky thrills the speaker of William Wordsworth's My Heart Leaps Up, written one night at Grasmere?

A rainbow gives the poem its other title, The Rainbow. Royal Mail chose an extract from it for a 2020 stamp marking 250 years since the poet's birth.

What did William Wordsworth campaign against in old age with a protest sonnet and letters to a London newspaper?

A railway from Kendal to Windermere would, he argued, wreck the Lake District landscape. The line opened anyway in 1847, and one of its engineers answered him with a poem of his own.

Which poet and artist claimed a passage in Wordsworth's The Excursion gave him a near-fatal bowel complaint?

William Blake told the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson so, and Robinson passed the remark on in a letter to Wordsworth's sister. Blake otherwise loved the poems, Robinson added.

Which fantasy author took the title of his 1955 memoir from William Wordsworth's poem Surprised by Joy?

C. S. Lewis used it for the story of his road from atheism to Christianity. Friends teased him about the title when he later married the American writer Joy Gresham.

Which 1798 collection did William Wordsworth publish anonymously with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge?

Lyrical Ballads is generally taken to mark the start of the English Romantic movement. Coleridge supplied only four of its poems, though they filled about a third of the book.

In William Wordsworth's sonnet The World Is Too Much with Us, what would the speaker rather be, to feel less forlorn?

A pagan, the speaker reasons, could at least glimpse the old sea gods in the waves. He calls that faith an outworn creed, yet envies its closeness to nature.

At what time of day does William Wordsworth admire London in Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802?

Early morning fits the facts: his sister's journal says they left London at half past five or six. The date in the title is off, though, since they crossed the bridge on 31 July.

Which ruin on the River Wye names a poem William Wordsworth claimed to compose entirely in his head?

Tintern Abbey itself never appears in the poem, which is set a few miles upstream. It was slipped into his joint 1798 collection with Coleridge at the eleventh hour, as the closing piece.

Which Greek sea god does William Wordsworth long to see rising from the waves in The World Is Too Much with Us?

Proteus was the shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea, able to foretell the future but apt to change form to avoid doing so. The sonnet pairs him with Triton, who blows a horn.

William Wordsworth's sonnet The World Is Too Much with Us scolds an industrialising Britain for surrendering to what?

Materialism is the charge: people absorbed in earning and buying have, he says, drifted out of tune with nature. It was one of several sonnets he aimed at the cynicism of the age.

In William Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much with Us, what are the six lines that answer the opening eight called?

The sestet is where the sonnet turns from complaint to its startling wish. The rhymes shift as well, from the octave's ABBA ABBA to CDCD CD.

Which 1807 collection first printed William Wordsworth's The World Is Too Much with Us, to hostile reviews?

Poems, in Two Volumes also held his ode on childhood and his best-loved lines on lakeside flowers. Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review was among the critics who mauled it.

To which port across the Channel was William Wordsworth travelling when he crossed Westminster Bridge in July 1802?

Calais was where Annette Vallon, his love of ten years before, was waiting. With the Peace of Amiens letting Britons cross to the Continent again, he went to tell her he was about to marry someone else.

Which sonnet form did William Wordsworth use for Composed upon Westminster Bridge?

Petrarchan sonnets, named after the Italian poet Petrarch, set an octave against a six-line answer. Wordsworth took to the sonnet in earnest only in May 1802, and went on to write hundreds of them.

In William Wordsworth's Composed upon Westminster Bridge, what do the very houses of London seem to be?

Asleep is the word the critic Cleanth Brooks singled out: the poet chose it over dead, so the hushed city reads as a living thing at rest.

What does William Wordsworth say the London air is free of in Composed upon Westminster Bridge?

Smoke from countless coal fires usually hung over London. His sister's journal for that day notes that the houses were not overhung by their cloud of it, and that the sun shone with a pure light.

In what were William Wordsworth and his sister riding when the view from Westminster Bridge inspired his famous sonnet?

A stagecoach bound for Dover carried them over the bridge, so the sonnet's famous stillness was seen from a moving seat. They had boarded at Charing Cross.

What collective name did the hostile Edinburgh Review give William Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey?

The Lake Poets began as an insult and was never accurate, since the three followed no single school of thought. Readers of their verse flocked to the Lake District all the same.

Which former inn at Grasmere was William Wordsworth's home from 1799 to 1808, the years of his finest poetry?

Dove Cottage had been a pub called the Dove and Olive before he rented it for £5 a year. Thomas De Quincey took it over when the growing family moved out.

In which Cumbrian town was William Wordsworth born, in a Georgian house later saved from becoming a bus station?

Cockermouth was also the birthplace of his sister Dorothy, born there the following year. A national campaign rescued the family home, which passed to the National Trust in 1938.

At which university did William Wordsworth take his degree, spending the holidays on long walking tours?

Cambridge gave him a BA in 1791, from St John's College. His youngest brother Christopher went further there, rising to be Master of Trinity College.

In which Lakeland village did William Wordsworth attend grammar school after his mother's death?

Hawkshead Grammar School, founded in 1585, had a fine name for mathematics and for getting boys into university. It closed in 1909 and became a museum.

Which childhood friend from Penrith became William Wordsworth's wife and lived to publish his greatest poem?

Mary Hutchinson had met him at a school in Penrith when both were small. They could afford to marry in 1802 only after an earl's heir repaid £4,000 long owed to the poet's late father.

Which upheaval thrilled the young William Wordsworth on a visit abroad in 1791, then left him bitterly disillusioned?

The French Revolution won him over to the Republican cause, and he fell in love with Annette Vallon while there. The Reign of Terror soured him, and he came home alone.

Who followed William Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850, after Samuel Rogers turned the post down?

Alfred Tennyson went on to hold the laureateship until 1892, the longest tenure of any laureate. Wordsworth, by contrast, wrote no official verses at all in the post.

Which prime minister coaxed a reluctant William Wordsworth into becoming Poet Laureate by promising him no duties?

Robert Peel assured him that he would have nothing required of him. Wordsworth had first refused the honour, pleading old age, when Robert Southey's death left it vacant.

Which government post in Westmorland gave William Wordsworth a steady £400 a year from 1813?

Distributor of Stamps was the job, and its salary made him financially secure at last, though at the cost of his political independence. That same year the family moved to Rydal Mount.

Beside which lake did William Wordsworth and his sister see the long belt of wild flowers behind his most famous poem?

Ullswater lay on their way home from visiting the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson in April 1802. He wrote the poem two years later, at Grasmere.

Which autobiographical epic by William Wordsworth was published only after his death, with a title chosen by his widow?

The Prelude had no title in his lifetime: he called it the poem to Coleridge, the friend it addresses. He began it at 28 and kept revising it for the rest of his life.

Which vast three-part philosophical poem did William Wordsworth plan for decades but never manage to finish?

The Recluse was meant to surpass Paradise Lost and would have run to about three times its length. Only its second part, The Excursion, was ever completed and published.

Which seventeenth-century poet does William Wordsworth wish were alive again in his sonnet London, 1802?

John Milton, the sonnet says, had a soul like a star and a voice like the sea. Wordsworth calls on him to lift an England he thought had grown stagnant and selfish.

What humble trade does the old man follow in William Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence, based on a real meeting?

Leech-gathering is the old man's living, and his patience shames the poet out of his gloom. The White Knight's song in Through the Looking-Glass parodies the plot.

What is the occupation of Michael, ageing father of Luke, in the William Wordsworth poem that bears his name?

Shepherd he may be, but Michael has a plain English name and a hard life, unlike the idyllic Greek-styled figures of older pastoral. Some critics read the poem as a protest at enclosure.

In which country did William Wordsworth make the six-week tour that inspired his poem The Solitary Reaper?

Scotland supplied the Highland girl who sings alone as she cuts the grain. The poet cannot follow her words, so the poem dwells on the sound of the song itself.

In which country did a homesick William Wordsworth spend the winter of 1798–99, starting his verse autobiography?

Germany was a shared trip with Coleridge, who thrived there while the Wordsworths endured a lonely winter in the town of Goslar. Those months nonetheless produced some of his best-known short lyrics.

Which unrhymed poetic form carries most of William Wordsworth's narrative poem Michael?

Blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, was his chosen vehicle for long poems, his autobiography included. Critics note how he fits it with plain words of one and two syllables in Michael.

In his famous 1800 preface, William Wordsworth defined poetry as the spontaneous overflow of what?

Powerful feelings, he added, should be recalled later in a calm state before they become verse. The preface came to be seen as the manifesto of the Romantic movement.

Which William Wordsworth poem gave Elia Kazan's 1961 film Splendor in the Grass its title?

The Immortality Ode supplied the phrase, and the film's heroine is heard reciting four of its lines. The poem builds on the idea that the soul exists before the body.

Which girl's name links five William Wordsworth elegies, including She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways?

Lucy has never been identified, and scholars have long debated whether she was a real woman or an invention. Wordsworth never grouped the five as a set; editors did that after his death.

In which William Wordsworth poem does a little cottage girl refuse to accept that her dead brother and sister are gone?

We Are Seven grew from a girl he met at Goodrich Castle in 1793. He went back to look for her nearly fifty years later, but had never learned her name.

Which verse tragedy, the only play William Wordsworth ever wrote, was rejected by Covent Garden in 1797?

The Borderers is set in the reign of Henry III, amid raids along England's northern frontier. The theatre's manager thought it could never succeed on stage, and it stayed unpublished until 1842.

William Wordsworth wrote Character of the Happy Warrior in 1806, soon after which national hero was killed in action?

Lord Nelson had died at Trafalgar the previous autumn, and the poem sketches the ideal man in arms with him in mind. Its title became a stock phrase in political and military life.

How did William Wordsworth's brother John, a sea captain, die in 1805, a loss that shook the poet deeply?

In a shipwreck in Weymouth Bay, when the Earl of Abergavenny, the East Indiaman he commanded, sank within days of leaving Portsmouth. The loss may have shaped his brother's plans for his long poems.

Who walks beside the sea with William Wordsworth in his sonnet It Is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free?

His daughter Caroline, aged nine, was meeting her father for the first time during that visit in August 1802. It was the one personal sonnet among the political ones he wrote that year.

Which younger Romantic poet mocked William Wordsworth as a sell-out in the 1819 satire Peter Bell the Third?

Percy Shelley wrote it in Italy after reading about the stir over the original Peter Bell. He recast its hero as a poet who trades his reforming ideals for government approval.

Which Victorian poet attacked William Wordsworth for deserting the liberal cause in The Lost Leader?

Robert Browning had admired the early Wordsworth and hoped to be his radical successor. The older poet's drift towards conservative politics and the established church left him disillusioned.

Which Lake District mountain is the setting of Benjamin Robert Haydon's portrait of William Wordsworth deep in thought?

Helvellyn was a peak he had climbed with his brother John back in 1800. Haydon's 1842 portrait sets him among the clouds, and Keats pictured him on the same summit in a sonnet.

Which Welsh mountain does William Wordsworth ascend in the climactic final book of his long verse autobiography?

Snowdon, the highest mountain in Wales, gives the poem its closing vision. Throughout the work such real journeys stand for stages in the growth of a poet's mind.