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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In the Advertisement to the volume of his collected sonnets, published in 1838, Wordsworth wrote:
My admiration of some of the Sonnets of Milton, first tempted me to write in that form. The fact is … mentioned … as a public acknowledgment of one of the innumerable obligations, which, as a Poet and a Man, I am under to our great fellow-countryman.
1 “I had long been well acquainted with them … ”: Wordsworth wrote Landor on April 20, 1822, that he had known Milton's sonnets by heart at the time Dorothy read them to him. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, ed. De Selincourt (Oxford, 1939), i, 71.
2 See Note 1.
3 That is, at least 7,322 lines in this form—and more, if we count alternate versions of the various sonnets.
4 Wordsworth's Poetical Works: Early Poems (Oxford, 1940), p. 318.
5 “Wm. slept better—better this morning—he had [words omitted] epitaph, and altered one that he wrote when he was a boy.” The bearing of this entry upon the present problem is, of course, purely conjectural.
6 November, 1802; Early Letters, ed. De Selincourt (Oxford, 1935), p. 312.
7 See Note 1.
8 The paragraph in Dorothy's Journal following the entry for July 27, 1802, gives us this correct date for “Westminster Bridge.”
9 Thomas Hutchinson, “Note on the Wordsworthian Sonnet,” in Poems in Two Volumes … Reprinted from the original Edition of 1807 (London, 1897), I, 208-226; see especially 210-213.
10 Laurence Housman includes “Calm is all nature” in his recent Wordsworth Anthology (New York, 1946), in which only fifteen of Wordsworth's sonnets are represented. It appears in good company—between the Immortality Ode and “Tintern Abbey” 
11 See “The King of Sweden,” “To Toussaint L'Ouverture,” “September, 1802, near Dover,” “London, 1802,” and “Dark and more dark the shades of evening fell.”
12 Raymond D. Havens, The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1922), p. 530.
13 See Note 6.
14 In 1787, while at school, he wrote one Shakespearean sonnet, “On seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams weep.”
15 Havens, p. 532.