In August 2015, a friend sent me a link to a free online poetry course. The course was titled “William Wordsworth: Poetry, People and Place.” For four weeks, the course would be exploring Wordsworth’s poetry in the stunning locations where it was written and that it was written about. I did not know who William Wordsworth was.
The introduction to the course revealed Wordsworth as an important poet in English literature. I grew up in Tanzania. Wordsworth wasn’t in my school syllabus. Shaaban bin Robert, Okot p’Bitek, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o were. Why bother now learning about an English Romantic poet and his writing process?
As a self-taught creative writer, I was not too keen on taking the course.