If Wordsworth hadn't listened to advice from his wife, his first line would have been 'I wandered lonely as a cow'. (Source, letter in The Times about 10 years ago, quoted by Leyla Sanai.)
"There is no evidence to support the oft-repeated claim that Wordsworth originally had ‘I wandered lonely as a cow’ until Dorothy advised him to alter it to ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, though it’s a nice story: the myth may have originated in Conrad Aiken’s 1952 novel Ushant." http://interestingliterature.com/2015/04/07/interesting-facts-about-william-wordsworth/
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"There is no evidence to support the oft-repeated claim that Wordsworth originally had ‘I wandered lonely as a cow’ until Dorothy advised him to alter it to ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, though it’s a nice story: the myth may have originated in Conrad Aiken’s 1952 novel Ushant."
ReplyDeletehttp://interestingliterature.com/2015/04/07/interesting-facts-about-william-wordsworth/
Thank you - and Dorothy was not his wife but his sister.
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