Gill's biography is considered to be the definitive word on Wordsworth. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (1989) In his preface to the second edition of the book, Wordsworth sounded off his vision of a new style in poetics, one free of the "gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers."_CITATION36_ Wordsworth and Coleridge's collaboration (though Wordsworth demanded sole author credit, five of the poems are by Coleridge) was the kick-off to the Romantic era. If you read just one book of Romantic poetry, make it this one. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1798) Maybe your soul-and your sanity-could use a little Wordsworth. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that Wordsworth did "more for the sanity of this generation than any other writer." The world is with us far more now than it was in the nineteenth century. By the time he died in 1850, Wordsworth was so famous that tourists flocked to the Lake District village of Grasmere just to peer in his windows. He had a few different families during his adult life, some of which were unconventional-a partner and illegitimate daughter in France during the French Revolution, an unorthodox but literary household containing his sister Dorothy and Coleridge, and eventually a wife and five kids. He wrote poems in his head as he wandered through the hills and moors. He lived in England's scenic Lake District instead of urban London. Wordsworth was the quintessential figure of Romanticism. When he wrote about a field of daffodils, he didn't want you just to think about it-he wanted you to f eel those flowers, to feel the breeze against your skin and the sense of peace this sight brought to your soul. He wanted to create poetry that reunited readers with true emotions and feelings. Even in the nineteenth century, Wordsworth felt that the world was "too much with us"-too fast-paced, too noisy, too full of mindless entertainment. Their seminal 1798 poetry collection, Lyrical Ballads, helped to launch the Romantic era of English literature, in which writers sought to unite the tranquility of nature and the inner emotional world of men. Born in 1770, Wordsworth and his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge invented a new style of poetry in which nature and the diction of the common man trumped formal, stylized language. William Wordsworth was an English poet, a key figure of Romanticism, and the author of the most famous poem ever written about daffodils.
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