ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter begins with the line “I wandered lonely as a cloud.” This plain statement ranks among the most famous opening lines in Romantic poetry—maybe in world poetry. Wordsworth’s poem, in which the speaker describes his encounter with a host of wild daffodils, initiates an extended analysis arguing that the commonness of the daffodils matters precisely because for Wordsworth it is the imagination (not the external object) that constitutes poetic experience. Moreover, abrupt miniature daffodil-like epiphanies that stop you in your tracks, which Wordsworth elsewhere calls spots of time, demonstrate how commonplace events and scenes suddenly radiate with imaginative transcendence. You don’t need mountain gloom or mountain glory as a source of powerful emotions and poetic revelations. You don’t even need daffodils. All you really need is to wander. Wandering, unlike marching, depends on an unhurried pace, as if time were suspended, with wanderers improvising a path, embracing whatever happens or just falls out, open to commonplace, dazzling accidents of light and shade. It might be said, with a sideway glance, that Wordsworth’s entire development as a poet depended on learning how to wander.
