On this day William Wordsworth finished writing "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798." Wordsworth worked on the poem during a 4-day walking tour of the region, composing as he walked by way of a singsong, "booing and hawing" method he had developed, but "not any part of it was written down till I reached Bristol" on the 13th. Delivered to the printers the next day, the poem would become the second most famous one in Lyrical Ballads -- after Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" -- and his preface announcing a new movement in poetry would make the collection itself one of the most famous in literary history ... FULL STORY »
