User:Fowler&fowler/The Lucy poems
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The Lucy poems are a series of five poems composed by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) between 1798 and 1801. They were first published in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), a volume of verse written jointly by Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Wordsworth’s first major publication and a milestone in the development of the English Romantic movement.[2] The series centres on the narrator's unrequited love for Lucy, who has died. She remains physically distant in all five poems and her death weighs heavily on the poet throughout, imbuing the verse with a melancholy, elegiac tone.
The "Lucy poems" are considered among Wordsworth's finest work. Although they are presented as a series today, Wordsworth did not conceive of them as a group, nor did he publish the poems together. Following his stay in Goslar, Germany during 1798–1799, he made many revisions to the poems and their sequencing in Lyrical Ballads . Although he did not change the theory of his poetry and claimed to be only refining his development from mirroring to expressing aspects of life,[3] thematic shifts are evident from the surviving drafts. Only after Wordsworth's death in 1850 did publishers and critics start to treat the poems as a fixed series, and since then anthologies have presented them as a group.
Whether the character Lucy was based on a real woman or was a figment of the poet's imagination has long been a matter of debate amongst scholars. Generally reticent about the poems, Wordsworth never revealed the details of her identity.[4] Some have speculated that Lucy is based on Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy, while others see her as an idealised figure. Scholars, however, agree that Lucy is a literary device employed by the poet to meditate on loss, nature and beauty.