Selected Poems

Front Cover
Penguin, 1994 - 587 pages
This book contains a selection of the shorter poems, including Wordsworth's whole contribution to the Lyrical Ballads (1798), several tales from The Excursion and over half of The Prelude. Two additional features of this edition are new versions of The Pe
 

Selected pages

Contents

Lines Written as a School Exercise at Hawkshead
1
Beauty and Moonlight
4
Extract from the Conclusion of a Poem
5
When slow from pensive twilights latest gleams
6
Lines Written While Sailing in a Boat at Evening
7
The Female Vagrant
8
The Convict
16
Animal Tranquillity and Decay
18
On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic
168
Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
170
Calais August 1802
171
It is a beauteous evening calm and free
172
September 1802 Near Dover
173
Written in London September 1802
174
To the Men of Kent October 1803
175
October 1803 These times
176

To My Sister
20
Goody Blake and Harry Gill
21
The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman
25
Her Eyes are Wild
28
The Idiot Boy
31
The Last of the Flock
45
We are Seven
48
Simon Lee
50
The Thorn
53
Lines Written in Early Spring
61
Anecdote for Fathers
62
Expostulation and Reply
64
The Tables Turned
65
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey
66
The Reverie of Poor Susan
70
A NightPiece
71
The Old Cumberland Beggar
72
A whirlblast from behind the hilf
77
A slumber did my spirit seaf
78
Three years she grew in sun and shower
79
I travelled among unknown men
81
Matthew
83
The Two April Mornings
84
The Fountain
86
Lucy Gray or Solitude
88
A Poets Epitaph
91
The Brothers
93
To M H
105
fresh and clear
111
To Joanna
113
When to the attractions of the busy world
115
Michael
118
To a Young Lady
131
The Sailors Mother
132
Alice Fell or Poverty
133
Beggars
135
To a Butterfly Stay near me
136
To the Cuckoo O blithe Newcomer
137
My heart leaps up when I behold
138
Intimations of Immortality
139
The Sparrows Nest
145
Written in March
146
The Green Linnet
147
To the Daisy Bright Flower
148
To a Butterfly Ive watched
149
To the Same Flower The Small Celandine
151
Resolution and Independence
153
Travelling
158
Stanzas Written in my PocketCopy
159
1801 I grieved for Buonaparté
161
England the time is come when thou shouldst wean
162
When I have borne in memory what has tamed
163
Personal Talk
164
The world is too much with us late and soon
166
Where lies the Land to which yon Ship must go?
167
The Pedlar and the Ruined Cottage
178
She was a Phantom of delight
203
The Small Celandine
204
Ode to Duty
205
I wandered lonely as a cloud
207
YewTrees
208
Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle
209
Stepping Westward
211
The Solitary Reaper
212
Character of the Happy Warrior
213
The Waggoner
215
StarGazers
239
Yes it was the mountain Echo
241
Lines Composed at Grasmere
264
Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland
265
November 1806
266
Gypsies
271
St Pauls
272
Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old
273
The Excursion
274
The Tale of the Whig and the Jacobite
275
The Story of Ellen
279
The Pastors Children
286
Yarrow Visited
287
Laodamia
290
Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty
295
Sole listener Duddon to the breeze that played
297
Return Content for fondly I pursued
298
Mutability
299
To a Skylark Ethereal minstrel
300
Yarrow Revisited
301
On the Departure of Sir Walter Scott
304
Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes
305
Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg
306
Final FourteenBook Version MS E
307
Schooltime continued
324
Residence at Cambridge
337
Summer Vacation
347
Books
359
Cambridge and the Alps
366
Residence in London
374
Retrospect Love of Nature leading to Love of Man
382
Residence in France
388
France continued
395
France concluded
401
Imagination and Taste how impaired and restored
407
Subject concluded
415
Conclusion
421
Preface to Lyrical Ballads 1802 with Appendix
431
Preface to Poems 1815 with Essay Supplementary
461
Notes
503
Index of Titles
581
Index of First Lines
585
Copyright

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About the author (1994)

William Wordsworth, 1770 - 1850 Born April 7, 1770 in the "Lake Country" of northern England, the great English poet William Wordsworth, son of a prominent aristocrat, was orphaned at an early age. He attended boarding school in Hawkesmead and, after an undistinguished career at Cambridge, he spent a year in revolutionary France, before returning to England a penniless radical. Wordsworth later received honorary degrees from the University of Durham and Oxford University. He is best known for his work "The Prelude", which was published after his death. For five years, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived very frugally in rural England, where they met Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "Lyrical Ballads", published anonymously in 1798, led off with Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" and ended with Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey". Between these two masterworks are at least a dozen other great poems. "Lyrical Ballads" is often said to mark the beginning of the English romantic revolution. A second, augmented edition in 1800 was prefaced by one of the great manifestos in world literature, an essay that called for natural language in poetry, subject matter dealing with ordinary men and women, a return to emotions and imagination, and a conception of poetry as pleasure and prophecy. Together with Robert Southey, these three were known as the "Lake Poets", the elite of English poetry. Before he was 30, Wordsworth had begun the supreme work of his life, The Prelude, an immensely long autobiographical work on "The Growth of the Poet's Mind," a theme unprecedented in poetry. Although first finished in 1805, The Prelude was never published in Wordsworth's lifetime. Between 1797 and 1807, he produced a steady stream of magnificent works, but little of his work over the last four decades of his life matters greatly. "The Excursion", a poem of epic length, was considered by Hazlitt and Keats to be among the wonders of the age. After "Lyrical Ballads", Wordsworth turned to his own life, his spiritual and poetical development, as his major theme. More than anyone else, he dealt with mysterious affinities between nature and humanity. Poems like the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" have a mystical power quite independent of any particular creed, and simple lyrics like "The Solitary Reaper" produced amazingly powerful effects with the simplest materials. Wordsworth also revived the sonnet and is one of the greatest masters of that form. Wordsworth is one of the giants of English poetry and criticism, his work ranging from the almost childishly simple to the philosophically profound. Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson in 1802 and in 1813, obtained a sinecure as distributor of stamps for Westmoreland. At this stage of his life, Wordsworth's political beliefs had strayed from liberal to staunchly conservative. His last works were published around 1835, a few trickled in as the years went on, but the bulk of his writing had slowed. In 1842 he was awarded a government pension and in 1843 became the Poet Laureate of England, after the post was vacated by his friend Coleridge. Wordsworth wrote over 523 sonnets in the course of his lifetime. Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount on April 23, 1850. He is buried in Grasme Curchyard. He was 80 years old.

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