The Lucy poems are a series of five poems composed by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) between 1798 and 1801. All but one were first published during 1800 in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collaboration between Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge that was both Wordsworth's first major publication and a milestone in the early English Romantic movement. In the series, Wordsworth sought to write unaffected English verse infused with abstract ideals of beauty, nature, love, longing, and death.
William Shuter, Portrait of William Wordsworth, 1798. Earliest known portrait of Wordsworth, painted in the year he wrote the first drafts of "The Lucy poems"
Title page for the first edition of Lyrical Ballads
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by Peter Van Dyke, 1795. A major poet and one of the foremost critics of the day, Coleridge collaborated on Lyrical Ballads with Wordsworth and remained a close friend and confidant for many years.
W. Crowbent, 1907, Portrait of Dorothy Wordsworth, depicting her later in life, (drawing from a photograph).
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Anonymous portrait of Wordsworth, c. 1840-50
Wordsworth in 1798, about the time he began The Prelude.
Dove Cottage (Town End, Grasmere) – home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, 1799–1808; home of Thomas De Quincey, 1809–1820
Rydal Mount – home to Wordsworth 1813–1850. Hundreds of visitors came here to see him over the years
