William Wordsworth
Quick answer: William Wordsworth craft guide: plain language, emotion recollected in tranquillity and the spots of time method, with the key poems to read first.
Modern plain-style poetry begins with Wordsworth. In the preface to Lyrical Ballads he argued that poems should use the real language of ordinary people, and then spent fifty years proving it could carry philosophy, grief and joy. Every poet who has ever been told to cut the fancy words is standing downstream of that decision.
He also gave writers their most quoted definition of the art: poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, taking its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. The second half of that sentence is the working method, and it is teachable.
The poem
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
William Wordsworth, 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' (1807)
Who Wordsworth was
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) grew up in the English Lake District, was radicalised by revolutionary France, and settled at Grasmere, where he wrote most of his enduring work in close collaboration with his sister Dorothy and his friend Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads (1798), their joint volume, is conventionally dated as the start of English Romanticism.
His masterpiece, The Prelude, a book-length blank verse autobiography of his own mind, was revised across his lifetime and published only after his death in 1850. He served as Poet Laureate from 1843.
The signature moves
Four habits define the Wordsworth method.
What you can learn from him
Stop writing about events the week they happen. Give an experience six months, then write what memory kept; the discarded details were the padding. This one habit will improve emotional accuracy more than any thesaurus.
Mine your own spots of time. List five moments before age twelve that you can still see in colour, and treat each as a poem in which something was being decided about who you would become. Keep the vocabulary within your everyday speech, and let line breaks and syntax supply the elevation.
Where to start reading
The short lyrics open the door; The Prelude is the house.
What poets can take from this
- Write about an experience only after enough time has passed for details to fall away.
- List five vivid childhood memories and draft one as a poem about formation, not nostalgia.
- Ban yourself from words you would not say aloud to a friend.
- Let a landscape act on your speaker: verbs first, scenery second.
- Close with what the memory does for you now, not what it felt like then.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about a childhood memory involving water, a lake, a tap, rain on a window, told from the present, ending on what the memory still gives or costs you.
Questions
What does 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' mean?
Wordsworth's account of how poems get written: not in the heat of feeling but later, when calm reflection recreates the emotion in a form the poet can shape. It appears in his preface to Lyrical Ballads.
What is The Prelude about?
It is a blank verse autobiography tracing the growth of Wordsworth's own mind from childhood through the French Revolution. He revised it for decades; it appeared in 1850, after his death.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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