Selected Poetry – William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is one of the most important and enduringly popular of all the English poets.

Wordsworth’s verse declares a belief in the power of poetry to teach by appealing to the imagination and to the `grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which man knows, and feels, and lives, and moves’. His unique relationship with the poet and political activist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, founded in the political and social ferment of 1795, produced a revolution in literature, resulting in the joint volume, Lyrical Ballads (1798-1805) – a landmark in the history of English Romanticism. In this edition the poems are given in the texts in which they first appeared, and were appreciated by Keats, Shelley, Hazlitt and other contemporaries.

This selection, chosen from the Oxford Authors critical edition, includes all Wordsworth’s finest lyrics, and a large sample of The Prelude (1805), his extraordinary autobiographical poem in blank verse and the first truly great achievement of a new era in English poetry.