Poetry advice from William Wordsworth sold at auction for £8,000 (From Daily Echo)

Poetry advice from William Wordsworth sold at auction for £8,000

8:30am Sunday 3rd May 2009

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IT was a lesson from a master penned more than 170 years ago.

Now unique poetry-writing advice handed out by William Wordsworth has been sold for more than £8,000 at a Hampshire auction.

The bard’s words of wisdom were recorded in a letter to fellow poet Robert Southey in 1840.

They were snapped up for £8,825 by an anonymous collector from the New Forest, who paid more than £5,000 over the initial estimate.

Wordsworth, famous for his poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, was asked by Southey to run his eye over one of his poems.

In his reply, Wordswor th told Southey the “espression might be a little improved”

and went on to point out which parts of the four verse poem should be changed.

The letter that was sent via Southey’s wife Caroline was passed on to her cousins, the Burrard family of Lymington in the mid-19th century before it eventually fell into the hands of a collector who sold it at George Kidner Auctioneers of Lymington.

Edward Cowell, from the Emsworth Road-based auction house, said: “It is extremely rare to see a letter of this kind from someone like Wordsworth.

“There was a huge amount of interest in it, from museums, to private collectors to dealers and they were all British.”

The letter made up part of a small collection of other correspondence of the day, including by Florence Nightingale and Alfred Tennyson.

Southey, who was succeeded by Wordsworth as the poet laureate upon his death in 1843, wrote the poem My Days Among the Dead are Passed in 1840.

Wordsworth’s letter went on to make a series of suggestions on ways it could be improved.

Lynda Pratt, university lecturer and Robert Southey expert, said: “They had a healthy respect for each other’s work but there was a certain amount of rivalry between them, particularly on Wordsworth’s part.”

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