The Major Works

by William Wordsworth, Stephen Gill (Editor)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) has long been one of the best-known and best-loved English poets. The Lyrical Ballads, written with Coleridge, is a landmark in the history of English romantic poetry. His celebration of nature and of the beauty and poetry in the commonplace embody a unified and coherent vision that was profoundly innovative.

This volume presents the poems in their order of composition and in their earliest completed state, enabling the reader to trace Wordsworth's poetic development and to share the experience of his contemporaries. It includes a large sample of the finest lyrics, and also longer narratives such as The Ruined Cottage, Home at Grasmere, Peter Bell, and the autobiographical masterpiece, The Prelude (1805). All the major examples of Wordsworth's prose on the subject of poetry are also included.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, Literature, Romanticism, British Literature, 19th Century

784 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1805

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Alok Mishra · Rating 4 out of 5]

WW's poetry is remarkable, vivid and animated most of the times. He was not a simple personality to fit within the context of a limited timeframe, ideology or school of poetry. His words create something that is permanent and resonates for long within the minds of the readers. However, at times, the poems become transparent and you can actually see it the way you want - or just ignore it and think on your own about life and death and the ultimate truth. Powerful - if in one word you are asked to conclude!

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Wordsworth as a sort of spiritual salve, a way to escape our industrialized and technology-filled world, through lines like these:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is ours.

These lines seem especially poignant in our internet age, when the world is with us all the time, and we are increasingly focused on "getting and spending." And what of nature? We see little of ourselves in it, with the result that "we lay waste" to ourselves. This is why I love Wordsworth, because he's earnest and spiritual and, to me, surprisingly relevant.

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was in reading Wordsworth years ago that I learned that the ancient division between philosophy and poetry is a false one, and that both, rightly seen and wholeheartedly pursued, are ultimately convergent trajectories of the human spirit. Wordsworth is the quintessential philosophical poet, I think. His work best displays what contribution poetry can offer to philosophy in the search for wisdom.

It was especially his Preface to his Lyrical Ballads, and some of the poems contained therein, that articulated for me a concept of both knowledge and of truth - "truth as an invisible friend and hourly companion" - that seemed more primordial as well as being closer to home than any other I had encountered by that time. It was where I first realized that truth is a thing to be lived, a trivial ornament to the ego if it does not illuminate and direct our day-to-day walk through life. Here is one of the passages that rang bells for me, right from the horse's mouth:

“The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of science is pleasure; but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow-beings. The Man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science. Emphatically may it be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare hath said of man, ‘that he looks before and after.’ He is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge—it is as immortal as the heart of man.”

I would only add that philosophy+poetry, as records of the knowledge by which we live, together f
make up "the first and last of all knowledge," as well as together forming the kind of knowledge that constitutes "the rock of defence for human nature" even in times which we have forgotten the meaning of the word "human."

What kind of insight does poetry record? I think poetry models perspectives that are more encompassing than the one we usually see the aspect of things by. To understand poetry is to recreate, leap into, and internalize, the perspective the poem models. It isn't "merely" a theoretical system you can look at from a remove; it is an invitation to add to your own lenses another's, and to expand thereby your capacity for making a meaningful unity out of experience. Now, I can see that Wordsworth in this understanding is just a part of a larger buried tradition. Here's Blake: “As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.” The business of poetry, as each of them conducts it, is to form the eye, and thereby transform the whole personality, our experience, and, in doing so, to deepen our relation to our world. It is to dig wisdom deeper into the living flesh of the person, to bring it home, as it were, so that it transforms the way we see and so that it doesn't remain for us a mere compartmentalized acquisition distanced from our motivational and affective core. Reading Wordsworth's poetry, as a meditative exercise, can make insight effective into our lives by integrating it into our everyday way of looking at the world.

A prerequisite for this kind of transmission of wisdom is, of course, empathic identification with another's experience in order to expand our own capacity for experience. And as Schopenhauer pointed out, compassion is the basis of morality. Exercising our capacity for compassionate identification with another's point of view means more fully participating in what it means to be a full human being.

Wordsworth is another one of those underrated educators (in that he's appreciated as a purveyor of lofty but idle aesthetic exercises, not as someone with something to teach about being human, at least not outside the literature departments). Yet he is someone who can teach us to tap into capacities for relating to our world that we didn't know we had. In doing so, he gives us more, richer, and deeper material to reflect on. Poetry plants the lush garden of experience that philosophy reflects on, prunes and organizes. I am starting to think, more and more, that both philosophy and poetry are needed for the full realization of the human psyche's powers to perceive, to experience, and to understand its experience. Reading these poems a decade ago is what, I think, first planted the seeds of this insight.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems like "The Ruined Cottage" and "Tintern Abbey" are as close to perfect as poetry can be. Unpretentious, intellectual, and evocative. Wordsworth takes the simple and common and makes it achingly wonderful. Our sneering, eye-rolling, nod and wink post-modern sensibilities could certainly use a little more of the earnestness exhibited in these poems.

[Markus · Rating 5 out of 5]

From ' The Tables Turned' page 573 ...
"Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of
things; -
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
close up those barren leaves;
Come forth and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives. "

[Quiver · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Whate'er the weak may dread the wicked dare,
Thy lot, O man, is good, they portion fair!'
(Ode: The Pass of Kirkstone)

With high hopes I embarked on a mission to enjoy Wordsworth, for all his bucolic and purifying poetic offerings. To no avail. I struggled to keep my attention on the words, though, if pressed, I recognise their melody and flow—the content behind the words is somehow too thin and straightforward, the images called forth too edenic, too trusting and naive. Also, occasionally the spiritual component is distracting.

Perhaps on another day, with another mind-filter in place. Or perhaps never quite? Can one in love with Rilke and Valéry ever fully appreciate Wordsworth?

[Sophie]

Wordsworth is one of my favourite poets and I have read many of his poems at different times.

I read The Prelude 7th June 2016-18th June 2016. I enjoyed it but I would love to come back to it some time in the future and study it closely as I know I can get a lot more out of it.

"The Poet, gentle creature as he it,
Hath, like the Lover, his unruly times,
His fits when he is neither sick nor well,
Though no distress be near him but his own
Unmanageable thoughts."

[Aviva Pellman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Obviously I did not read this entire book because I would have killed myself. Prelude in its entirety almost made me do that. Yes some of it is beautiful but it doesn’t take away from the fact that Wordsworth just sounds like a preachy, self-obsessed, oafish prick the entire time. Men got rooms of their own and fucking lakes to prance around and miraculously they discovered the paradoxical nature between the individual and the divine fabric that we are all woven by, that connects us all… me personally I made that connection when I was five and shared a room with my brother and sister.

[[ J o ] · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Quick review from memory before I re-read and re-review at a later date]

(This is currently on the pile on poetry that I am aiming to read at some point, having bought this for university but probably didn't really pay much attention at the time. I'm not the biggest Wordsworth fan but I'm sure he'll have something decent within this brick of a book.)

[Flynn William · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good but wouldn't recommend reading after Blake.

[Alex]

4 or 4.5 (leaning towards 4.5)

To be transparent, I didn't read every poem in this collection (since it encompasses most of Wordsworth's works), but from what I did read, damn, he knew how to write good poetry.

Most of the poems are highly accessible (to the point that they feel childish) and carry very profound and interesting statements on nature, memory, industrialization, childhood, and philosophy. He wrote in many poetic styles, ranging from sonnets to epics to shot narrative poetry. Even his longest work, The Prelude, is just as accessible as it is profound. Every section has a double meaning, and it's up to the reader to decide how analytical they want to treat the poetry or whether they want to read it at face value. Whichever way you read it, it's a fantastic poem. If you enjoy romanticism, Wordsworth is a great poet to read.

[Adam Tierney-Eliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection that contains many of Wordsworth's most memorable poems while also helping to convey the important role that place played in his work. The edition reminds us of the characters and landscapes that draw people to his poetry today. These poems tell us that the space and people around us are worthy of notice. In this way he reminds me of HD Thoreau, whose relationship with the region of New England was as intense as Wordsworth's relationship with the Lake District.

An added bonus to this collection is that it makes a great companion to Stephen Gill's biography of Wordsworth as he also edited this collection. My reading of the biography has slowed as I frequently stop to look up the poems Gill references there.

[Sreena · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Wordsworth's poetry is a true reflection of the beauty and tranquility of nature. His vivid descriptions of the natural world and its effect on the human soul are breathtaking. As I read his works, I feel a sense of peace and serenity that is hard to find elsewhere.

"Come forth into the light of things, / Let Nature be your teacher." - from "The Tables Turned" by William Wordsworth. These lines perfectly capture the essence of Wordsworth's poetry, which is all about finding wisdom and solace in the natural world.

Myself being a person who finds solace in nature, his poetry has always been something close to my soul.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Does a love of nature increase your love for your fellow man, as William Wordsworth believed? I am not sure that it does. There are people who love animals, but have little time for human beings.

Then there are those members of rural communities who could identify several dozen birds by their song, but who do not seem especially caring. Still what does love of nature mean in this context anyway?

I’m sure farmers, hunters and anglers imagine themselves to be lovers of nature, and some of them may know more than me. Yet they engage in practices that are destructive of the very creatures, plants and habitat to which they supposedly belong. For that matter I have worked with people who manage a nature reserve, and none of them are vegetarians.

Love of nature is in all those cases very selective. One way or another they all manipulate nature for reasons of their own – for sport, for pleasure, for profit, or to suit their own philosophical concepts of how the natural world should look.

Even within a park or nature reserve, the rangers seek to alter the landscape to encourage biodiversity with little thought for the less well-loved species who have depended on this area as their home for many generations, and who have nowhere to go if the landscape is overturned to suit somebody’s whim about how the land should be kept.

Perhaps I should modify Wordsworth’s idea slightly, and say that compassion for nature is the quality that is more likely to increase your compassion for mankind. A protective love for the natural world, or a wish to honour it as it is – that is the better starting point for developing higher feelings.

William Wordsworth had this quality. He sincerely loved nature, and he seems to have been compassionate too. He loved birdsong, but finds time to honour the simply daisy or the celandine. He relishes the brooks and the groves that he finds.

I do not know what Wordsworth thought about hunting, but there are no poems here that glory in it, and one poem that deplores the death of a deer (“Hart-Leap Well”). In ‘Peter Bell’, Wordsworth seems to feel that cruelty towards a starving elderly donkey is hardly any worse than abandoning a pregnant girl.

Throughout his early poetry, Wordsworth constantly links compassion to humanity with a love of nature. I wish I could have seen the natural world that Wordsworth loved before the modern world crept into every vestige of it. I live near the Lakes, and have been there a number of times, but it is nothing like the place that gave Wordsworth such pleasure.

Connected with this is Wordsworth’s compassion for humanity, especially in his early poems. Whether it was beggars, elderly residents an idiot boy or destitute locals, Wordsworth showed a willingness to enter into their world, and to make us care for them.

This reflected Wordsworth’s radical political views at the time. He would eventually go to France during the years after the Revolution. While the poems do not directly express Revolutionary sentiments, his identification with those members of society who were suffering and neglected subtly indicated where Wordsworth’s sympathies lay.

Wordsworth’s political views were also expressed in his particular style of writing. He used much plainer and ordinary language, making his poetry accessible to more people. Wordsworth would never say ‘fleecy brethren’ when he meant to say ‘sheep’. His style was direct and personal.

Some of the poems honour people whom Wordsworth admired. Death is a theme here, appropriate at a time when life spans were shorter and infant mortality was higher. Wordsworth mourns the deaths of people he loved. He also saw the death of some of his children, though this is less evident in his poetry.

Sadly Wordsworth’s experience of the abuses of the French Revolution did trigger a change in his political views, and this arguably resulted in a decline in his poetry in later years. By the time Byron and Shelley were writing their works, Wordsworth was seen as a conservative. Byron was especially insulting about the older poet.

What brought about this change? Certainly there was Wordsworth’s shift in politics, and his increasing religiosity. Still many poets have been conservative and Christian and continued to write outstanding verse. Why not Wordsworth?

Perhaps the problem is that Wordsworth’s strength was his compassion for the ordinary man. By the late poems, this compassion has been replaced by increasing mistrust. There is also something about the way in which Wordsworth incorporated his new-found conservatism into his poetry.

Consider the political poems. Later poems seem comparatively starchy and formal, expressing conventional patriotic sentiments. You can write good poetry that is conservative, but you still need to bring something of your own personal outlook to it. Wordworth merely mouthed banalities.

Then there is Wordsworth’s Christian faith. Unlike Byron or Shelley, Wordsworth was always a believer. Nonetheless the early poetry expressed this faith in a more broad-minded way that people of any faith might respect. Later poems slide into a morbid Christian sentimentality that insistently finds its way into his verse.

It is not only Wordsworth’s views, but his poetic style that becomes more conservative. The rhyming verse seems far freer in his early works. Later on it feels more mechanical and sing-song. Wordsworth also loses some of his plain style, and engages in more tedious rhetorical devices that make the poems less accessible and less interesting.

What happened here? I fear that one of the problems is that Wordsworth lived too long for his own good as a poet. He lived for 80 years. It is easy for Byron and Shelley to stay fresh, because they died young.

Both poets were born well after Wordsworth, and died long before Wordsworth. There was no time for a future generation of poets to arrive who thought that their style was old-fashioned, no time for them to become more staid and unimaginative as the years went by.

Wordsworth by contrast lived well into the Victorian age, only dying in 1850. By then he wrote few poems. Notably many of the late poems in this collection are attempts to revisit earlier poetry that he had wrote. This is not the mark of a man with new ideas.

Still it was hard for Wordsworth to keep innovating. It is far easier for the writer who latches on to the latest trends in writing, and adds their own stamp to them. Wordsworth was an innovator in his youth, and this made him a trend setter rather than a trend follower. He had established his own path, and found it hard to step off it.

Nonetheless with all his faults Wordsworth is one of Britain’s greatest poets. His best poems are sensitive and imaginative. He has warmth and a sense of awe for what he sees around him. Better still he inspires that awe in his reader.

I did not read the prose works at the end of this volume, and I did not read the Prelude. I will be reading the Prelude as a stand-alone work at a later date, and I will review it then.

[Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, Wordsworth. I have read at least a little bit of the output of almost all of the great English romantics that are considered part of the traditional cannon. I enjoyed a lot of their work, but no poet of that age could ever speak to me like Wordsworth.

This volume is over 1,000 pages long, so not every poem collected here is great. And the conventional criticism that later Wordsworth is not as good as young Wordsworth is certainly true. But Wordsworth's view of poetry as "a man speaking to men" and his profound relationship with nature that comes through so often, make him readable even 200 years after most of these were written. Perhaps not as dynamic as Blake, perhaps less intellectual than Coleridge, Wordsworth speaks with undiminished clarity and sincerity that is unmatched among the romantics. There is no better volume to put in your backpack for a walk in nature on a pleasant day.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay. I have a real problem with William Wordsworth, for a number of reasons.

1. He's totally ripping off Charlotte Smith.
2. He completely took over Lyrical Ballads with his trite sayings about daffodils, when Coleridge's poems are really what interests (me, at least) the most.
3. His hypocritical turn to hardcore Anglicanism and his seeming surrender at the end of his life really bug the revolutionary Romantic in me.
4. If I read "Tintern Abbey" one more time, I'm going to throw up.

That being said, Wordsworth is a terribly, terribly important literary figure, and some of his works have serious merit and are highly interesting. It's just that I get tired of him being touted as "the ultimate Romantic," when I feel there are so many other diverse directions in which to puruse Romantic studies.

[Briana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mehhhhhh...I only read the Prelude. Once again, I learned how immature and impatient I am as a reader and how I don't appreciate nice things. I wish I was grownup enough to enjoy hearing about someone wandering around and around in nature and becoming more and more self-aware. Well, no, I don't wish that, but it probably would have helped.

I don't think I would have liked to have known Wordsworth. Not that there's anything wrong with him or that I dislike him on a moral level, but I feel like our personalities clash a bit.

I did like the part where Wordsworth didn't like college very much and got drunk at a party and then had to run like an ostrich to get to chapel. That was fun. (You know those moments where you finally decipher a long passage and it ends up being funny and normal-person-esque and funnier because you had to work at it? Yeah. That was this passage.)

[Christopher Manieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wordsworth, the inspiring Romantic, is one of my favourite poets of all-time. I love his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, in which he exalts the joy of youth. Wordsworth’s poems exemplify a passionate quest for the Infinite through his appreciation of the beauty of nature and the beauty of the mind itself. This beauty leads to the Divine. His fascinating epic “The Prelude” shows the development of his thought and philosophy.

[Amateur-Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read that edition from cover to cover except the notes. William Wordsworth is an exceptional poet indeed. He knows how to relate external landscape and atmosphere to the internal essence and feelings. William is an alt environmentalist and he depicts nature in an impeccable mode. From Lyrical Ballads, to narrative poems, and the autobiographical The prelude, nature is referred to and is emphasised in most of the poems. It is all in all a worthy experience of reading.

[Rahul Anand · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the finest poet of the English language. His most of the poems reflect about nature and scenery of her beauty. His works are a real masterclass. I remember one of his poem 'The solitary reaper' that has struck my heart at the core. His poems are realistic, sarcastic and beautiful to read or sing it.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have recently read the complete works of William Blake and Walt Whitman and I thought I William Wordsworth was the piece missing from my poetic imagination, unifying these two giants. I'm going to be reading the major works of Percy Shelley sometime before the end of the year.

[lizzy ☆彡 · Rating 3 out of 5]

how many words is a wordsworth worth if a wordsworth is from cockermouth?

read the prelude: got inspired, got bored, loved the language, disliked wordsworth himself. at least i got to read some kant for my essay on the sublime. that, and a new appreciation for moonlight.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these poems, have spent time in the Lake District and can understand the natural aspect he took but also love the way he is commenting on the changing culture, we don’t seem to have poets like this anymore.

[Saloni Ranjan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems by Wordsworth are amazing... he lives his verse and that's why they become so immortal and widespread.

[Doris Raines · Rating 5 out of 5]

NICE BOOK.

[Cyprien Saito · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems I read in my childhood.

[Aladdin Aldair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paginated pulchritude

[Vishvapani · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent edition with helpful notes throughout. The 1805 version of the Prelude is certainly the one I want to have to hand to read and reread.

[Angela]

Read for my English class, British Literature and Culture: Romanticism and the Anthropocene.

[Steffi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know how to explain it but this man GETS it. Every profound experience I’ve ever had in solitude, surrounded by nature, put to words. Absolutely bussin 😫