Wordsworth letters sold for £6,350
Christie's Images LimitedLetters by William Wordsworth in which he revealed he was struggling to pen lines of poetry have sold for £6,350 at auction.
One was addressed to fellow writer Thomas De Quincey, with two going to Irish physicist Sir William Rowan Hamilton.
Thomas Venning, head of department, books and manuscripts at auction house Christie's, said the correspondence showed Wordsworth had been a "revolutionary youth" who saw his creativity "drying up" as he grew older.
Born in 1770, he lived in Cockermouth and then the Lake District until his death in 1850.
In one of the letters to Sir William, dated 1830, Wordsworth acknowledged he had "scarcely written a hundred verses during the last twelve months".
Venning described him as having "lived a life of two halves".
"[He was] a revolutionary youth, full of creativity, living on the edge – and a comfortable, acclaimed middle age, but with his ability to write poetry increasingly and painfully drying up.
"The letter gives a little insight into this, with his admission that he is averaging barely a single line of poetry every three days.
"You can sense his almost touching pleasure at having written the 14 lines of a sonnet only two days before.
"Perhaps his gift had not altogether deserted him."
The sale price included buyer's fees. They had previously been auctioned by Sotheby's in 1983.
Wordsworth was famous for works including I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud - more commonly known as Daffodils.
That poem, written in 1804, was inspired by flowers seen by Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy on the shore of Ullswater two years earlier.
