Selected Poetry by William Wordsworth

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Original Title: Selected Poetry

ISBN: 0199536880
ISBN13: 9780199536887
Autor: William Wordsworth
Rating: 4.9 of 5 stars (119) counts
Original Format: Paperback, 252 pages
Download Format: PDF, DJVU, iBook, MP3.
Published: September 1st 2008 / by Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Genre(s):
Poetry- 134 users
Classics- 22 users
Literature >19th Century- 8 users
Fiction- 6 users
Literature >18th Century- 4 users
European Literature >British Literature- 4 users
Literature- 3 users
Literature >English Literature- 2 users

Description:

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.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest
spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's
commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable
features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text,
up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

About Author:

***Updated on April 29th, see below***

I can't help it if my heart doesn't leap with joy with Wordsworth's respectful and magisterial poems.
I feel some kind of guilty distance with his realistic and moderated exultation of Nature, his
aspirations towards perfection and his Odes full of bucolic and idealized countryside.
There are some brilliant stanzas though which show the almost anecdotal wonders of an
apparently monotonous life, but still I find them lacking in originality and too self-centered in the
soul of the poet, framed in nature, basking in the mutual reflection between the soul and the world;
the landscape becoming the revealing image of moral life and religious transcendence. And this
recurring need to isolate his artistic self in order to write straight from the soul is not convincing, at
least for me.
Maybe because he is trying too hard, but he doesn't reach to me the way that other poets do, for
example, Robert Frost, who also speaks of the rural life but with an underlying need to return to
the origins, which is absent in Wordsworth's poems.
"Humility and modest awe, themselves
Betray me, serving often for a cloak
To a more subtle selfishness; that now
Locks every function up in blank reserve,
Now dupes me, trusting to an anxious eye"
His poems leak with more consciousness than inspiration, his verses being usually nostalgic
recollections of a better times, usually during childhood, when the soul is in harmony with the
world and experiences are lived intensely and purely.
"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;-
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen now I can see no more."
But somehow, his willingness to elevate his writing to the intellectual knowledge and to
democratize the lyrical language creates an artificial rhetoric which diminishes the impact of his
words, at least for me.
"Ye winds and sounding cataracts! 'tis yours,
Ye mountains! thine, O Nature! Thou hast fed
My lofty speculations; and in thee,
For this uneasy heart of ours, I find
A never-failing principle of joy
And purest passion."
Nevertheless, I have to give him credit for being one of the first English Romantic Poets who will
lay the foundations for Byron, Shelley and Keats, and for trying to elevate his meditations towards
great poetry.
Although not one of my favorites, (I'm aware I'll make a bunch of detractors here), he surely
earned the right to be read and re-read again and again.
---UPDATE ON APRIL 29TH----
Only for this article I'd give the book another star, interesting thoughts regarding poetry&science.
Thanks Cristina for pointing this out.