Synopses & Reviews
For many, William Wordsworth personifies the Age of Romanticism. The Prelude, his masterpiece, is one of the finest poems in the English language, and the Lyrical Ballads, written with his friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a defining text of the Romantic movement. This new selection of his poetry, prepared by his biographer Stephen Gill and the Wordsworth scholar Duncan Wu from Gill's authoritative Oxford Authors edition, offers generous extracts from The Prelude, his work from Lyrical Ballads, as well as many of his fine shorter lyrics. It charts the growth of this great poet's mind from his early radical years as a champion of the French Revolution, to his later years as Poet Laureate and political conservative.
Synopsis
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is one of the most important and enduringly popular of all the English poets. 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. 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.