SOURCE: Woof, Pamela. “Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals and the Engendering of Poetry.” In Wordsworth in Context, edited by Pauline Fletcher and John Murphy, pp. 122-55. Canterbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1992.

In the following essay, Woof studies the relationships between Dorothy Wordsworth's journals and William Wordsworth's poems.

The story of how some of Wordsworth's poetry was engendered can be pieced together from Dorothy's Journal, and this will be the subject of the first part of this paper. The second part will be a discussion of some of the characteristics of prose poetry that Dorothy engendered in her own writing. Her accounts of daily life, by no means shaped for artistic effect, nevertheless sometimes attained that effect; her words often surprise us as poetry does with that sudden surge into truth.

I

The poem “Beggars” was written 13-14 March 1802; its origin lay in an encounter that took place on 27 May...