Portraits · Poets · V of XIV

William Wordsworth

1770–1850 · Poet

…Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced … but by a man who … had also thought long and deeply.
For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply.
William Wordsworth · preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800

Read it in the source →

William Wordsworth wrote this in his Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, the book he had first published with Coleridge in 1798. Everyone remembers the start of the sentence: good poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings".

The rest is the maker's half: no poem of value was ever written by someone who had not also thought long and deeply.

Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800 text). Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, 2 vols (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800 [issued January 1801]), vol. 1, p. xiv.

The originals

Portrait of the elderly William Wordsworth in a dark coat and high white collar — **The likeness**PAINTED BY HENRY WILLIAM PICKERSGILL · 1840Our portrait is painted after it.Public domain (painter died 1875; Art UK reproduction; Commons tags it PD). Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, GRMDC.A8.

The title page of Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, in two volumes, by W. Wordsworth, vol. I, 1800 — **Lyrical Ballads, 1800**Volume one of the 1800 edition, now under his name alone. It was the first to carry his Preface, the source of this line.Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, vol. I, second edition (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1800), title page. Public domain, Internet Archive scan via Wikimedia Commons.