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William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads.
Wordsworth's masterpiece is generally considered to be The Prelude, an autobiographical poem of his early years, which the poet revised and expanded a number of times. The work was posthumously titled and published, prior to which, it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was England's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.
I decided to read this particular volume of Wordsworth’s poetry to accompany a book on Scottish folklore I had read recently. Wordsworth wrote some of the poetry in this volume as a response to a trip he made to Scotland with his sister Dorothy and friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Unfortunately the trip strained the friendship of the two poets. A number of the poems in this volume are lackluster. The best have a strong nature focus and the worst a soppy romantic attitude towards Scottish children.
It’s always good to reread poetry that you’ve forgotten about, but I’d take Keats, Shelley, or Byron any day. A better choice for my purposes might have been the travel book written by Dorothy Wordsworth after the Scottish trip debacle.