William Wordsworth

I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I think it’s clear to any scholar that I was the “greenest” writer of the Romantic period (and Victorian period, for that matter). For crying out loud, I outlined an entirely new poetic manifesto in my Preface to Lyrical Ballads that showed how nature and everyday life could be elevated in poetry. If you don’t believe me, here’s exactly what I wrote shortly into the Preface:

“The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout…and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way” (Wordsworth 264).

You see, I took the natural surroundings and I added my own poetic devices and sophistication to help people realize the beauty of things that one sees every day. For example, I used personification in my poem, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” to elevate the beauty in daffodils and in a lake.

When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze (Wordsworth 306, ll. 3-6)

The daffodils are like people dancing, and a few lines later, I have the lake join the flowers in the dance:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee (Wordsworth 306, ll. 11-14)

I’ll let you readers decide for yourself, but I think the evidence is clear that I am the greenest writer you’ll hear from today.