<P> Wordsworth was aware of the appropriateness of the idea of daffodils which "flash upon that inward eye" because in his 1815 version he added a note commenting on the "flash" as an "ocular spectrum". Coleridge in Biographia Literaria of 1817, while he acknowledged the concept of "visual spectrum" as being "well known", described Wordsworth's (and Mary's) lines, amongst others, as "mental bombast". Fred Blick has shown that the idea of flashing flowers was derived from the "Elizabeth Linnaeus Phenomenon", so - called because of the discovery of flashing flowers by Elizabeth Linnaeus in 1762 . Wordsworth described it as "rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, rather than an exertion of it ..." The phenomenon was reported upon in 1789 and 1794 by Erasmus Darwin, whose work Wordsworth certainly read . </P> <P> The entire household thus contributed to the poem . Nevertheless, Wordsworth's biographer Mary Moorman, notes that Dorothy was excluded from the poem, even though she had seen the daffodils together with Wordsworth . The poem itself was placed in a section of Poems in Two Volumes entitled "Moods of my Mind" in which he grouped together his most deeply felt lyrics . Others included "To a Butterfly", a childhood recollection of chasing butterflies with Dorothy, and "The Sparrow's Nest", in which he says of Dorothy "She gave me eyes, she gave me ears". </P> <P> The earlier Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poems by both himself and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had been first published in 1798 and had started the romantic movement in England . It had brought Wordsworth and the other Lake poets into the poetic limelight . Wordsworth had published nothing new since the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, and a new publication was eagerly awaited . Wordsworth had, however, gained some financial security by the 1805 publication of the fourth edition of Lyrical Ballads; it was the first from which he enjoyed the profits of copyright ownership . He decided to turn away from the long poem he was working on (The Recluse) and devote more attention to publishing Poems in Two Volumes, in which "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" first appeared . </P> <P> Wordsworth revised the poem in 1815 . He replaced "dancing" with "golden"; "along" with "beside"; and "ten thousand" with "fluttering and". He then added a stanza between the first and second, and changed "laughing" to "jocund". The last stanza was left untouched . </P>

Poem i wandered lonely as a cloud summary