William Wordsworth is one of the most important and enduringly popular of all the English poets. Wordsworth's verse declares a belief in the power of poetry to teach by appealing to the imagination and to the 'grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which man knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.' His unique relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, formed in the political and social ferment of the 1790s, produced a revolution in literare, resulting in the joint volume Lyrical Ballads--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 achievment of a new era in English poetry. 252 pages.
