The Family Man...

On this day...Romantic poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved into Dove Cottage in 1799. The previous autumn had seen the pair in Germany, along with fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One of his many trips to Europe, Wordsworth was reportedly homesick and thus it was in 1799 that he moved back to the Lake District - the region in which he grew up. His work at this time comprised of 'The Lucy Poems', a series of five poems later included in his 'Lyrical Ballads' collection. Living near Coleridge and Robert Southey, the trio became collectively known as the 'Lake Poets'.

On this day...

William Wordsworth visited Tintern Abbey in 1798, inspiring him to write the eponymous poem. Wordsworth was on a four day walking tour in the Wye with his sister Dorothy, when he stumbled upon the ruins of the Tintern. Abandoned in 1536, the Cistercian Abbey sits in the southern Welsh county of Monmouthshire, yet 'not any part of it was written down till I reached Bristol', and the scripts were sent to the printer the day afterwards.

The poem was to become the final entry in Wordsworth's 'Lyrical Ballads', and was the only one of the collection which was he did not later revise, perhaps showing the purity of his writing as he composed the work. Wordsworth, as fits his usual style, fills the 'impassioned music of the versification' with references to nature and religion.

You and me could write a Bad Romance...

On a similar theme, the Guardian and Observer this week are launching a series about the Romantic poets. From tomorrow, each day the paper will include a booklet about an influential poet of the era, including Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge and Wordsworth. The booklets will contain some of their finest works, excerpts of personal correspondance and a foreward from a well known admirer; names such as Margaret Drabble, Andrew Motion, and even Germain Greer appearing. In honour of the series, Andrew Motion has recorded a podcast which can be found here

On this day...

English poet and critic Matthew Arnold was born in 1822. Son of Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School, Arnold had a privileged education, including a scholarship at Balliol College in Oxford. During his childhood, perhaps due to close frienship with neighbour William Wordsworth, Arnold won numerous literary prizes from both Latin and English poetry. Yet in 1851, finding himself short of the income to support a marriage, Arnold applied for the post of Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools, which he got, but later described as 'drugedy'. It was in 1857, having been appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford, that his literary career took off; his most famous works being 'Dover Beach' and 'The Scholar Gypsy'. He has been called the third greatest Victorian poet behind Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning.

A walk in the park...

This day also celebrates a more obscure anniversary. 1797 saw Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth embark on a walking holiday in Quantock Hills in Somerset; a holiday which would produce Coleridge's most famous work, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. Their original idea was to create a piece of work which would provide immediate commercial success to pay for their trip, preferrably something gothic to be included in popular magazines. However, Wordsworth stated that their styles 'would not assimilate', and so it was left to Coleridge to finish the work. Five months of work produced a finished article, and 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' was published in 'Lyrical Ballads' in 1798. Far from being a immediate bestseller, Coleridge's poem was criticised for being obscure and difficult to read, leading to a revised edition in 1815 in which he added marginal notes, glossing the text. The poem was succeeded by another of Coleridge's great works, 'Christabel'.