INSPIRATION: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Yes, my mind is still in the lake district I'm afraid!

This post is going to be a little different, because rather than me being inspired; this is about William Wordsworth being inspired.

There are a few things that inspired Wordsworth.

The first, was family.

Wordsworth's 'Dove Cottage' was tiny, I wasn't allowed to take photos but there were about 3 bedrooms, all of which were pretty dark. One is on the ground floor and William and his wife's room didn't have a roof when they were first married! The Guest room was the nicest room and the Wordsworths' had lots of people staying in that room. Most  notably Samuel Taylor Coleridge , another of the Lake Poets and admirer of  William's sister Dorothy Wordsworth, the author of The Grasmere Journals and others who also lived there.

Other people who stayed include Walter Scott and Thomas de Quincey, who stayed a very long time.

The Gravestone

So the house was pretty crowded, I didn't even go into where the 3 children slept before they decided to move; it was very small and very cold. So the other thing that inspired Wordsworth was, of course, the landscape.

William Wordsworth was actually born in Cockermouth, Cumberland. When I was a child and we would drive up to see the family, my brother would always ask how close to Cockinmouth we were. He left for a long time to travel and then decided that to create the best poetry, he needed to live in seclusion so that he could focus on his writing.

William Wordsworth became so successful that Queen Victoria asked him to become poet laureate.
He refused, saying that he couldn't write on demand the way that the job description would ask him to. She kept asking and eventually he agreed; Queen Victoria loved his work so much that she made a special condition for him. He was to be poet laureate but didn't have to write any poetry for her unless he was inspired to do so.

Wordsworth agreed to this but was never inspired to write and remains the only poet laureate never to have written any royal poetry.

I like that story, because Wordsworth felt strongly that he wanted his worth to be natural, and unforced. Of course, he had inherited a rather large fortune previously so I guess it's alright for him.


So that's it really! To the right is a picture of Glencoyne Bay, where Wordsworth wrote 'I Wandered Lonely as A Cloud'.