Selected Poems of William Wordsworth

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One of the major poets of Romanticism, Wordsworth epitomized the spirit of his age with his celebration of the natural world and the spontanous expression of feeling. This volume contains a rich selection from the most creative phase of his life, including extracts from his masterpiece, The Prelude, and the best-loved of his shorter poems such as ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’, ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’, ‘Lucy Gray’, and ‘Michael’. Together these poems demonstrate not only Wordsworth’s astonishing range and power, but the sustained and coherent vision that informed his work. William Wordsworth: Selected PoemsChronology
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Texts
Selected Poems
Old Man Travelling
The Ruined Cottage
A Night-Piece
The Old Cumberland Beggar
Lines Written at a Small Distance from my House
Goody Blake and Harry Gill
The Thorn
The Idiot Boy
Lines Written in Early Spring
Anecdote for Fathers
We Are Seven
Expostulation and Reply
The Tables Turned
Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
The Fountain
The Two April Mornings
‘A slumber did my spirit seal’
Song (‘She dwelt among th’ untrodden ways’)
‘Strange fits of passion I have known’
Lucy Gray
Nutting
‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’
The Brothers
Hart-Leap Well
from Home at Grasmere
from Poems on the Naming of Places
To Joanna
‘A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags’
Michael
‘I travelled among unknown Men’
To a Sky-Lark
Alice Fell
Beggars
To a Butterfly (‘Stay near me’)
To the Cuckoo
‘My heart leaps up when i behold’
To H. C., Six Years Old
‘Among all lovely things my Love had been’
To a Butterfly (‘I’ve watched you’)
Resolution and Independence
‘Within our happy Castle there dwelt one’
‘The world is too much with us’
‘With Ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh’
‘Dear Native Brooks your ways have i pursued’
‘Great Men have been among us’
‘It is not to be thought of that the Flood’
‘When I have borne in memory what has tamed’
‘England! the time is come when thou shouldst wean’
Composed by the Seas-Side, near Calais
‘It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free’
To Toussaint L’Ouverture
Composed in the Valley, near Dover, on the Day of Landing
Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
London, 1802
‘Nuns fret not at their Convent’s narrow room’
Yarrow Unvisited
‘She was a Phantom of delight’
Ode to Duty
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’
Stepping Westward
The Solitary Reaper
Elegiac Stanzas
A Complaint
Gipsies
St. Paul’s
‘Surprised by joy—impatient asthe Wind’
Yew-Trees
Composed at Cora Linn
Yarrow Visited
To R. B. Haydon, Esq. (‘High is our calling, Friend!’)
Sequel to the Foregoing (Beggars)
Ode: Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty
The River Duddon: Conclusion
‘The unremitting voice of nightly streams’
Airey-Force Valley
Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg
‘Glad sight wherever new with old’
At Furness Abbey
‘I know an aged Man constrained to dwell’
from The Prelude
Book I
Book II
Book III
Book IV
Book V
Book VI
Book VII
Book VIII
Book IX
Book X
Book XI
Book XII
Book XIII
Notes
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth in the Lake District and educated at Cambridge. As a young man he was fired with enthusiasm for the French Revolution but the year he spent in France after graduating left him disillusioned with radical politics. He turned more seriously to literature and, in collaboration with his friend Coleridge, produced Lyrical Ballads (1798). His return to the Lake District in 1799 marked the beginning of his most productive period as a poet, during which he wrote his most famous long poem, The Prelude (1805). Stephen Gill a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He holds degrees from Oxford and Edinburgh Universities and is a long-serving member of the Wordsworth Trust. He has written William Wordsworth: A Life (1989) and Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998). GB

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