He believed that poetry could use the real language of ordinary people in a state of ‘vivid sensation’. He published the influential Lyrical Ballads, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 1798, rejecting the contrived, self-consciously poetic language that was fashionable at the time. Wordsworth’s early poems transformed the way in which poets came to express themselves. It clearly means a large number but there is also an association with the act of Holy Communion where the “host” is the wafer. Consider also the use of the word “host”. For example, look at the way Wordsworth uses the idea of dancing as a thread running through the poem. Was Byron being unfair by describing the poem as not simple but childish? Certainly this is not a difficult poem to understand but perhaps it is easy to underestimate its subtlety. The Romantic idea of the poet being somehow different or a lonely outsider is also prominent. In many ways this is a quintessentially Romantic poem with its obvious love of Nature and preoccupation with the relationship between man, Nature, imagination and memory. What do you think accounts for its very real and enduring popularity? ![]() And yet this is a much loved poem memorised by many. There is a thoroughly unreliable story enjoyed by those who like to have fun at the expense of the poem that Wordsworth originally wrote “I wandered lonely as a cow” until persuaded by his sister to change cow to “cloud” and Lord Byron described the poem as “puerile”. ![]() “Daffodils” is not only one of Wordsworth’s most well-known and anthologised poems but also one of the most familiar poems in English Literature with its much quoted opening line.
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