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Take Your Poet to Work: William Wordsworth

By Will Willingham 20 Comments

Take Your Poet to Work Day - William Wordsworth Featured

Summer is one of the happiest seasons at Tweetspeak Poetry, because it is the season of Take Your Poet to Work Day (or, you know, to the beach). It’s one thing to start every day with a poem (we recommend it). But how great would it be to start your day with a poet? On Take Your Poet to Work Day, we encourage people around the world to take their favorite poet to work for the day.

Take Your Poet to Work Day is coming July 20, 2016

To help you play and celebrate with us, we’re releasing poets each week in a compact, convenient format you can tuck in your pocket, tool belt, or lunchbox. We started our celebration three years ago with Sara Teasdale,  Pablo Neruda,  T. S. Eliot,  Rumi,  Edgar Allan Poe,  and the reclusive Emily Dickinson (for folks who work at home). We even released a full collection,  The Haiku Masters: Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. In 2014, we added Langston Hughes,  Adrienne Rich,  John Keats,  William Butler Yeats,  Christina Rossetti and the beloved 20th-century American poet, Sylvia Plath. And last year, we introduced the Bard of Avon William Shakespeare,  beloved poet Maya Angelou, and iconic American poet Robert Frost,  Russian poet Anna Akhmatova,  Polish poet Wisława Szymborska,  and America’s poet, Walt Whitman.

Because you can never have too many poets in your lunch box (or your desk drawer), we have a new collection of poets to release this year, including the latest, English Romantic poet William Wordsworth.

Take Your Poet to Work: William Wordsworth

Take Your Poet to Work Day - Printable William Wordsworth

Get your own downloadable version of Take Your Poet to Work Day – Printable William Wordsworth that you can print, color and cut out for the big day.

William Wordsworth, an English poet born in 1770, is credited with having a strong impact on the poetry of his time. He worked with Samuel Taylor Coleridge to publish a collection, Lyrical Ballads, which includes poems believed to be among the most influential in Western literature. With this publication, the two helped initiate English literature’s Romantic Age.

Wordsworth also worked to increase the accessibility of poetry, encouraging the use of more common language, and promoting the virtues of lyric poetry.

While in college, Wordsworth went on a walking tour of England and lived for a time in France, where he was greatly impacted by the French Revolution. His earliest work was published in 1793.

His most famous work, The Prelude, was published by his widow in 1850. He worked on the semi-autobiographical poem throughout much of his life, never quite satisfied to publish it.

Wordsworth served as England’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until he died in 1950.

The World is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

—William Wordsworth

Post and illustrations by LW Lindquist. Wordsworth poem is in the public domain.

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Will Willingham
Will Willingham
Director of Many Things; Senior Editor, Designer and Illustrator at Tweetspeak Poetry
I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.
Will Willingham
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Filed Under: Blog, Moon poems, Nature Poems, Poems, poetry, Take Your Poet to Work Day, William Wordsworth

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About Will Willingham

I used to be a claims adjuster, helping people and insurance companies make sense of loss. Now, I train other folks with ladders and tape measures to go and do likewise. Sometimes, when I’m not scaling small buildings or crunching numbers with my bare hands, I read Keats upside down. My first novel is Adjustments.

Comments

  1. Kelly Candaele says

    June 13, 2016 at 12:26 pm

    Took Seamus Heaney to work. Construction site – Los Angeles

    https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/st-kevin-construction-site

    Reply
    • Laura (L.L.) Barkat says

      June 13, 2016 at 1:24 pm

      Kelly, very timely article, and inspiring. I especially like these moments:

      • a truth telling arena but not a killing field

      • Heaney felt that the “subtleties and tolerances” were what his poetry demanded and what his community needed

      • Nonetheless, if poetry has never stopped a tank, as he conceded, Heaney retained a belief that poetic stories could bear values into the world that were critical.

      • For electrician Tim McArdle, the poem quickened his own aspiration — the glimpsed desire of a more selfless stance toward those around him.

      • When Heaney looked up from his monkish desk — rather like St. Kevin — he began to direct his imagination away from the murderous, thus creating artistic space for the marvelous. Reading a poem to a construction site offers workers a similar opportunity to “look up” momentarily from their labor. As they were reading the poem and later talking about it, they expressed a sense of joy in doing so — the strangeness of it giving them new angles for understanding what they do every day.

      • he and his fellow cigar rollers always had one roller read to them while they were working. The others set aside enough cigars to take care of the daily wages of the reader. The readings drawn from literature, political theory, theater, and history were an “entrance into a wider world” for Gompers and his fellow workers.

      ***
      Now, I wonder if the construction workers might go so far as to bring cutout poets to the site. Or maybe you will take along a collection to share? One never knows 😉

      Reply
      • Kelly Candaele says

        June 13, 2016 at 1:43 pm

        I’ll bring a cutout poet and afix it to the topping out beam.

        Reply
        • L.L. Barkat says

          June 13, 2016 at 3:43 pm

          Oh, fun 🙂

          You can share pictures with us if you like, on July 20, via Twitter. Just include @tspoetry and #poettowork so we see it.

          Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Take Your Poet to Work: Seamus Heaney - says:
    June 23, 2016 at 10:58 am

    […] drawer), we have a new collection of poets to release this year, including English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and this week’s release, Irish poet Seamus […]

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  2. Special Podcast Series - Coaching Writers to Fill the Gap - says:
    July 8, 2016 at 8:37 am

    […] and do the same thing. They want to compose a poem in the style of Elizabeth Barrett Browning or William Wordsworth, or they long to pen prose like Joseph Heller or Toni […]

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  3. Take Your Poet to Work Day is Coming: Here's Our 2016 Free Coloring Book! - says:
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    […] Take Your Poet to Work Day Coloring Book, updated with our fresh new crop of 2016 poets, including William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Seamus Heaney, and Emily Brontë, Judith Wright, and Henry […]

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  4. TAKE YOUR POET TO WORK DAY 2016 | ELA in the middle says:
    July 15, 2016 at 5:21 pm

    […] Take Your Poet to Work Day Coloring Book, updated with our fresh new crop of 2016 poets, including William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Seamus Heaney, and Emily Brontë, Judith Wright, and Henry […]

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  5. Rivers and Lakes Poetry Prompt: Be a Lake Poet - says:
    July 18, 2016 at 8:01 am

    […] of the nineteenth century. The three main poets of what has become known as the Lakes School were William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert […]

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  6. Take Your Poet to Work Day: On Location - says:
    July 20, 2016 at 1:47 pm

    […] Szymborska and William Wordsworth came up with a plan to make Michelangelo’s Statue of David safe for work. […]

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  7. TAKE YOUR POET TO WORK DAY: ON LOCATION | ELA in the middle says:
    July 23, 2016 at 11:51 am

    […] butPablo Neruda and Sara Teasdale talked her into a trip to Hollywood. Wisława Szymborska and William Wordsworth came up with a plan to make Michelangelo’s Statue of David safe for work. Walt Whitman might […]

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  8. Why Read a Poem at a Time Like This? - says:
    October 28, 2016 at 8:01 am

    […] comfortable people can write poetry. Wordsworth had a pretty cozy cottage in the Lake District. Eliot lived fairly well, though he suffered a good […]

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  9. William Wordsworth and the Language of the Common Man - says:
    November 1, 2016 at 5:01 am

    […] had studied some of the poems of  William Wordsworth poems in high school, but it wasn’t until my English literature courses in college that I studied […]

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  10. Committing Prufrock: Poetry Memorization Tips & Memories - says:
    August 31, 2017 at 8:55 am

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  11. Bring in the Cupcakes! It's Take Your Poet to School Week - says:
    April 2, 2018 at 7:26 am

    […] Sara Teasdale Pablo Neruda The Haiku Masters Edgar Allan Poe T.S. Eliot Rumi Emily Dickinson John Keats Adrienne Rich W.B. Yeats Langston Hughes Sylvia Plath Christina Rossetti Walt Whitman William Shakespeare Maya Angelou Wisława Szymborska Anna Akhmatova Robert Frost Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Judith Wright Emily Brontë Seamus Heaney Elizabeth Barrett Browning William Wordsworth […]

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  12. Take Your Poet to Work Day: C. D. Wright | says:
    June 19, 2019 at 11:07 am

    […] 2016, English Romantic poet William Wordsworth,  joined in, along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning,  Irish poet Seamus Heaney,  and English […]

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  13. Take Your Poet to Work Day: Tony Hoagland | says:
    June 26, 2019 at 5:01 am

    […] 2016, English Romantic poet William Wordsworth,  joined in, along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning,  Irish poet Seamus Heaney,  and English […]

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  14. Take Your Poet to Work Day: Mary Oliver | says:
    July 4, 2019 at 2:35 pm

    […] 2016, English Romantic poet William Wordsworth,  joined in, along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning,  Irish poet Seamus Heaney,  and English […]

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  15. Take Your Poet to Work Day: W. S. Merwin | says:
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  16. Earth Song Book Club: The Wild Places - Tweetspeak Poetry says:
    August 3, 2023 at 2:26 pm

    […] —William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey” […]

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