It had brought Wordsworth and the other Lake poets into the poetic limelight. The earlier Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by both Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had been first published in 1798 and had started the romantic movement in England. Others included ' To a Butterfly', a childhood recollection of chasing butterflies with Dorothy, and ' The Sparrow's Nest', in which he says of Dorothy 'She gave me eyes, she gave me ears'. The poem itself was placed in a section of Poems in Two Volumes entitled 'Moods of my Mind' in which he grouped together his most deeply felt lyrics.

Nevertheless, Wordsworth's biographer Mary Moorman notes that Dorothy was excluded from the poem, even though she had seen the daffodils together with Wordsworth. The entire household thus contributed to the poem. Wordsworth described it as 'rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, rather than an exertion of it.' The phenomenon was reported upon in 17 by Erasmus Darwin, whose work Wordsworth certainly read. Fred Blick has shown that the idea of flashing flowers was derived from the ' Elizabeth Linnaeus phenomenon', so called because of the discovery of flashing flowers by Elizabeth Linnaeus in 1762. Coleridge in Biographia Literaria of 1817, while acknowledging the concept of 'visual spectrum' as being 'well known', described Wordsworth's (and Mary's) lines, among others, as 'mental bombast'. Wordsworth was aware of the appropriateness of the idea of daffodils which 'flash upon that inward eye' because in his 1815 version he added a note commenting on the 'flash' as an 'ocular spectrum'. Mary contributed what Wordsworth later said were the two best lines in the poem, recalling the 'tranquil restoration' of Tintern Abbey, 'They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude' Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal Thursday, 15 April 1802ДЄt the time he wrote the poem, Wordsworth was living with his wife, Mary Hutchinson, and sister Dorothy at Town End, in Grasmere in the Lake District. The Bays were stormy and we heard the waves at different distances and in the middle of the water like the Sea. There was here and there a little knot and a few stragglers a few yards higher up but they were so few as not to disturb the simplicity and unity and life of that one busy highway вЂ“ We rested again and again. This wind blew directly over the lake to them. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the Lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side, we fancied that the lake had floated the seed ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up вЂ“ But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. Often anthologised, the poem is commonly seen as a classic of English Romantic poetry, although Poems, in Two Volumes, in which it first appeared, was poorly reviewed by Wordsworth's contemporaries. In a poll conducted in 1995 by the BBC Radio 4 Bookworm programme to determine the nation's favourite poems, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud came fifth.

Written some time between 18 (in 1804 by Wordsworth's own account), it was first published in 1807 in Poems, in Two Volumes, and a revised version was published in 1815. The poem was inspired by an event on 15 April 1802 in which Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy came across a 'long belt' of daffodils while wandering in the forest. It is one of the most popular poems of Wordsworth. ' I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' (also commonly known as ' Daffodils' ) is a lyric poem by William Wordsworth. That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

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