The poem was composed in 1800, and published in the second volume of the
_Lyrical Ballads_ in the same year. "Written at the Town-end, Grasmere,
about the same time as _The Brothers_. The Sheep-fold, on which so much
of the poem turns, remains, or rather the ruins of it. The character and
circumstances of Luke were taken from a family to whom had belonged, many
years before, the house we lived in at Town-end, along with some fields
and woodlands on the eastern shore of Grasmere. The name of the Evening
Star was not in fact given to this house, but to another on the same side
of the valley, more to the north."

In a letter to Charles James Fox the poet says: "In the two poems, _The
Brothers_ and _Michael_, I have attempted to draw a picture of the
domestic affections, as I know they exist among a class of men who are
now almost confined to the north of England. They are small independent
_proprietors_ of land, here called 'statesmen' [i.e., estates-men], men
of respectable education, who daily labor on their little properties. . .
Their little tract of land serves as a kind of rallying point for their
domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written, which makes
them objects of memory in a thousand instances, when they would otherwise
be forgotten. The two poems that I have mentioned were written to show
that men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply."

Edward Fulton in a _A Selection of the Shorter Poems of Wordsworth_
(Macmillan) says: "The reason Wordsworth succeeds best in describing the
type of character portrayed in _Michael_ and _The Brothers_ is, of
course, chiefly because he knew that type best; but the fact that it was
the type for which he himself might have stood as the representative was
not without its effect upon him. His ideal man is but a variation of
himself. As Dean Church puts it: 'The ideal man with Wordsworth is the
hard-headed, frugal, unambitious dalesman of his own hills, with his