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  • Published: 15 October 2000
  • ISBN: 9781857152456
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 560
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

Selected Poems




A fresh selection of Wordsworth's poetry from the poet's biographer.

It is hard to imagine how radically the tender songs and simple stories in this collection changed the history of English poetry, but Wordsworth exerted a profound influence on the whole of nineteeth-century culture in Britain and America.

His literary revolution was founded on three principles: introspection, nature worship and the cult of ordinary experience. These three he blended together in a verse which is simple in manner but profound and deeply moving in content. In an age of revolutionary upheaval, industrial stress and religious doubt, Wordsworth rediscovered spiritual value in the individual's encounter with nature. In our own age of ecological disaster and moral uncertainty, his achievement speaks to us more urgently than ever.

From the poet's extensive output, this comprehensive selection includes everything non-specialist readers are likely to need.

  • Published: 15 October 2000
  • ISBN: 9781857152456
  • Imprint: Everyman
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 560
  • RRP: $32.99
Categories:

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About the author

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was born in the Lake District in April 1770, and died there eighty years later on 23 April 1850. He had three brothers and a sister, Dorothy, to whom throughout his life he was especially close. When she was six, and he was nearly eight, their mother died. Dorothy was sent away to be brought up by relatives, and a year later William was sent to Hawkshead Grammar School, scene of the great childhood episodes of The Prelude.

Wordsworth was cared for in lodgings and led a life of exceptional freedom, roving over the fells that surround the village. The death of his father, agent to the immensely powerful landowner Sir James Lowther, broke in on this happiness when he was thirteen, but did not halt the education through nature that complemented his Hawkshead studies and became the theme of his poetry.

At Cambridge, Wordsworth travelled (experiencing the French Revolution at first hand) and wrote poetry. His twenties were spent as a wanderer, in France, Wales, London, the Lakes, Dorset and Germany. In France he fathered a child whom he did not meet till she was nine because of the War. In 1795 he was reunited with Dorothy, and met Coleridge, with whom he published Lyrical Ballads in 1898, and to whom he addressed The Prelude, his epic study of human consciousness.

In the last days of the century Wordsworth and Dorothy found a settled home at Dove Cottage, Grasmere. Here Wordsworth wrote much of his best-loved poetry, and Dorothy her famous Journals. In 1802 Wordsworth married Dorothy's closest friend, Mary Hutchinson.

Gradually he established himself as the great poet of his age, a turning-point coming with the Collected Poems of 1815. From 1813 Wordsworth and his family lived at Rydal Mount in the next-door valley to Grasmere. In 1843 he became Poet Laureate.

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