SIR, Your front page article (Gazette, March 29, 'Lakes in full bloom again') incorrectly states that Wordsworth wrote the poem 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' 200 years ago.
William and Dorothy Wordsworth visited the shores of Ullswater on April 15, 1802, as Dorothy recorded in her journal, so this year is the bicentenary of their visit.
William's poem, which draws substantially on details from his sister's journal, was written more than two years later.
William dated it Town End, 1804, and his biographer Mary Moorman suggests that it was probably written in the early summer of that year.
It was first published still later, in 1807.
The whole theme of the poem is, of course, the power of what Wordsworth called 'emotion recollected in tranquillity', so to see the poem as contempor-aneous with the visit on which it draws rather misses the point.
James W.
Worth
Kendal
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