Wordsworth's inspiration and influences

While leaving Cambridge University Wordsworth was still unsure of what he was going to do for work. He said that he felt he wasn't "good enough" for the church, He was not wanting to follow in his fathers footsteps of law. He thought it was unreal that he had a big enough size for a military career, and if he were ordered to go to the West Indies his talents wouldn’t be enough to protect him from the yellow fever. So for about a year he was jobless in England, he then moved to France to learn the language. The French revolution was starting and in the early stages. In Wordsworth's “Prelude”  he was over joyed with the expectations of a new world of social justice movement which made him and other young English liberals very stirred up. Wordsworth was a supporter of the French revolutionary War. The war was one of the big influences that were in his life. The reason that Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were so close was for their appreciation of nature and poetry. His influence was mostly nature and the sights that were around the lake that he had spent most of his mature life by. The start of his poetic career was when he met Coleridge, the two life long friends would see each other everyday and just talk about poetry, the Lyrical ballads was the first poem that was created by the two of them. "When most poets were still focusing on ancient heroes in grandiloquent style," Wordsworth was focused on nature, children, the poor, common people, and used regular everyday words to explain his feelings about whatever he was writing about. Wordsworth’s definition of poetry was "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings arising from "emotion recollected in tranquillity" so what he is saying is the  great overwhelming of powerful feelings that come from feelings that remind you of calmness. A quote from the poem that Coleridge and Wordsworth produced call Lyrical Ballads explains what poetry is to them "Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science." Poetry was about expressing what they were seeing in nature and how they were felling about it.