William Wordsworth: Selected Poems

by William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth is one of the beloved English poets of the late-18th and early-19th centuries. This edition of his selected poems includes classics
• "The Prelude"
• "Tintern Abbey"
• "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"
• "The World is Too Much With Us"
• "To a Butterfly"
• "We Are Seven"

Elegantly packaged with a ribbon marker, this volume is the perfect addition to any poetry library.

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

256 pages, Hardcover

First published February 10, 2002

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

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Conversation with Not while crossing Westminster Bridge earlier this afternoon:

N: Let's get off this bridge and go somewhere where there aren't so many fucking tourists.

Me: Hey! Remember Earth hath not anything to show more fair!

[Pause]

N: Than what?

[Pewterbreath · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wordsworth is a guilty dislike for me. So many poets don't only like him but credit him with their very inspiration as to what poetry is and should be. Last summer I endeavored to make peace with Wordsworth once and for all. I skipped the juvenelia, and went straight for the "young" Wordsworth. My complaints I can find very quickly--many many poems about A man wandering unhappy, ill at ease, or at least lonely--he encounters daffodils/a leech gatherer/nature's primal majesty and whatever was bothering him (it's never mentioned, P thinks he was probably irritated that his sister didn't press his shirts right) evaporates away. I find Wordsworth extraordinarily earnest--and if you take any Romanticism class they will go on and on about how "going back to nature" is supposed to be the cure towards the "evils of society."
The trouble is, I don't know if Wordsworth believed it. How many times did he see nature in his mind and not in reality? Also, the very fact that he wrote these poems, aren't they now mere memories and not the reality anymore? And also, if nature is the perfect balm why is he always wandering (I mean it doesn't sound as if the man is on his afternoon constitutional--he is endlessly wandering and searching.) Curiously, this take on him made him much more stomachable for me---I'm much more interested in people saying "What is this?" than "This is it!" Old Wordsworth is much less interesting--he gets preachy, moralistic, and becomes a voice for the old guard. But who can blame him--he long outlived his peers, and was finding himself struggling to be relevant in a new (extremely prosaic) age. I can say I can put my Wordsworth ambivalence to rest, and though I will never entirely like him, I can tip my hat in respect.

[Heidi'sbooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a selection of the poems found in this book. Isn't the cover gorgeous? I bought this Kindle version, but I wish I could have bought the book. Maybe I'll sneak out to Barnes and Noble sometime and try to find it.

You know, I appreciate William Wordsworth much more now than I did in college. I never thought of Wordsworth as one of my favorite poets—I like Emily Dickinson and Frost plus others. But, I think he might move up a bit on my list of favorites. I like the rapturous emotion in his poems, and I love his descriptive scenes of nature. I found lots of great quotes.

His theme of the carefree nature of children and their enjoyment in nature was great. It was joyful to read, and that theme seemed to carry through many of his poems. His descriptions of the restrictive and dry nature of education was sad.

Wordsworth said, “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."

This quote reminds me of Lines Written in Early Spring “I hear a thousand blended notes,/While in a grove I sate reclined,/In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts/Bring sad thoughts to the mind.” He goes on to reflect “Have I not reason to lament/What man has made of man?” That seems like his most moody poem or most melancholy.

And what about The Prelude when he came home for summer break after being away at Cambridge,

“Those walks in all their freshness now came back
Like a returning Spring. When first I made
Once more the circuit of our little lake,
If ever happiness hath lodged with man,
That day consummate happiness was mine,
Wide-spreading, steady, calm, contemplative. . .
Gently did my soul
Put off her veil, and, self-transmuted, stood
Naked, as in the presence of her God.”

I kept trying to figure out if Nature was his god or if he did bring God into it. He capitalized Nature as a Being almost. And sometimes I was sure he worshiped Nature and other times I thought he was just revitalized by it all. He does use the words Worship and Nature together.

He says in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey: “We stood together; and that I, so long/A worshipper of Nature, hither came/ Unwearied in that service.”

Then he says in The Prelude—“I am content/With my own modest pleasures, and have lived/With God and Nature communing.”

And after reading a bit on the internet, I don't think experts agree. So, I surely don't know, but it seemed to me at first glance that he treated God and Nature equally. One thing for sure, he's definitely a Romantic Poet.

[Teri-K · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a huge fan of Wordsworth's poetry and this Modern Library Edition is an excellent collection. The poems are laid out chronologically which makes it fun to watch his development if you read from beginning to end. At over 600 pages I didn't do that myself. But it is rewarding to see where a particular poem falls on the timeline and to read others written around the same time.

There's an interesting introduction by David Bromwich, which helps set Wordsworth's work in the times but also brings out his unique qualities. "He remains, at his most exuberant, the prophet of a purposeless attention to nature for it's own sake, a listening that can hardly be distinguished from reflection." He also suggests an interesting approach to reading these poems, beginning with the meditative "A Night Piece" and others. I followed his outline this time, and though I don't know if I found any deeper meaning because of this, it was at least one way to dive into such a massive number of poems, and helpful to see them grouped by theme.

The chief pleasure of such a large collection of poems by one person is twofold. First you get to dip in and out; some pieces won't work for you, another may become a new favorite, but exploring them can be fun. At other times you just want to reread your favorites, and they're bound to be here. So, though I wouldn't recommend such a comprehensive book to someone just discovering poetry or Wordsworth, for the fan it will become a treasure.

"Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy;"
Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tinturn Abbey

[Sarah Main · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to read and enjoy more poetry, but I can be a little picky. To my surprise, I loved so many of the poems in this collection. (This edition isn’t what I read; I couldn’t find what I was reading on Goodreads.)
Wordsworth’s writing is visually beautiful, and packed with so much joy, and occasionally sadness. You can tell that he truly paid attention to life as he was living it.
Some of my favorites were:
-It is a Beauteous Evening
-The Shepherd, Looking Eastward, Softly Said
-To My Sister
-We Are Seven
-Three Years She Grew
-My Heart Leaps Up
-Yarrow Unvisited
-I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud

[Abby Johns · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't find the version I read (Folio Society edited by Seamus Heaney) on GoodReads so this will have to do!

I can't believe that I hadn't read much Wordsworth before. I think my greater appreciation of the natural world and long walks during lockdown made Wordworth's poetry even more powerful to me. I was also surprised by how many poems dealt with issues of class and family bonds, which I wasn't expecting, and his appreciation of his own privileged position. Cannot recommend enough!

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

More dads need to love their daughters as Wordsworth loved his

[laura nicholson · Rating 4 out of 5]

i like the weird ones. i also like nutting

[Momo · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5 Semi enjoyed and good narration for the audiobook.

I really enjoyed the narrator for this and loved that they listed off some facts about the poet and his life. I liked the flow of the poems but didn't enjoy the poems themselves all that much. I wouldn't mind picking this up physically to see if I like it better in that format.

For my GR friends sorry for the spam of reads and reviews I'm a bit behind on my goal of trying to read a book for every day of the month/year (started this in march so it's not my Goodreads reading goal). Summer term is shorter than the other quarters and I added an extra class for this term and I've been dealing with getting on a medication and then having to get off of it because it messed up my vision so I have been pretty miserable and busy lol.

[Rose Rosetree · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

And so Wordsworth's wondrous words flowed and flowed. The output was prodigious, and sometimes... the quality was sublime. Witness "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey."

On the other hand...

It's reported that in 1818, John Keats dined with William and Mary Wordsworth. When Keats tries to make a point about poetry, Mary whispered to the poet of lesser fame (at the time), “Mr Wordsworth is never interrupted”

[Christy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth represents Wordsworth’s prolific output, from the poems first published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798 that changed the face of English poetry to the late “Yarrow Revisited.” Wordsworth’s poetry is celebrated for its deep feeling, its use of ordinary speech, the love of nature it expresses, and its representation of commonplace things and

[Lizzytish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for my club, actually just an assortment of his poetry. I love nature, so I enjoyed his perspective. My favorite was " I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud"
"And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."

[Sarah Robbins · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn’t read this collection specifically. I had to read a h*ck ton from an anthology and did not enjoy it, so I needed to document it in some way so that it at least counted for my book challenge. Thx.

[Winter Sophia Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Touching, Timeless & Beautiful! One Of The Greatest Poets!

[Thirza · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good collection of Wordsworth's wonderful poems.

[David Abrams · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me four months to the day, but I plowed through the 700 pages of William Wordsworth's poetry like a plowhorse. This was my first time through most of Wordsworth's work, having read "Lyrical Ballads" (which he wrote with Samuel Taylor Coleridge) a couple of years ago, and I'm so glad I devoted my spring and summer to further exploring the 19th-century poet. The true standout of his work is the autobiographical (and very long) "The Prelude." I couldn't have said it better than James Mustich in his "1,000 Books To Read Before You Die," which led me to visit Wordsworth: "In The Prelude’s thousands of pentameters, Wordsworth charts the fears and fabrications, the habits and the intuitions, the shaping processes and private emanations of the self, in a way that no seer had previously envisioned; in his pages the human imagination comes to life as a natural resource worth the work and wonder of cultivation."

I should add that the notes in this Modern Library edition, edited by Mark Van Doren, are excellent and illuminate Wordsworth's now-obscure references. This is perhaps the best volume of Wordsworth to start with.

[David]

I think this is my first time really being moved by poetry. I experienced what I hear people describe a poetry experience to be. That was cool.

I didn't plan on reading this entire book but I'm glad I did because the last poem was probably my favorite. He definitely experience writers block and describes it in the same way I've experienced it. It was encouraging to hear from such a great writer. It's sad he never finished his biggest work but the parts he did finish were great.

He also accomplished the goal he set out to accomplish in helping me appreciate nature in order to elevate the soul.

[Shervin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wordsworth is the most uneven poet I've ever read. Because when he's good, he's really good. But then he's boring for interminable pages where you'd rather watch paint dry. Wordsworth also doesn't really know when he has gold. Going on and on in poems long after they've already peaked, when it would be better to end on those high points.

I think if he chopped down his output, his reputation would be stronger than it is.

[carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

- ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’
- ‘The World Is Too Much With Us’
- ‘Surprised by Joy’
- ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’
- ‘The Thorn’
- ‘Strange Fits of Passion Have I Known’
- ‘A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’
- ‘She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways’
- ‘Three Years She Grew In Sun and Shower’

[Callie Hayes · Rating 5 out of 5]

such a wonderful read! i adore poetry, and as a poet myself, i loved reading it and taking in the different aspects of the writing. i certainly enjoyed Nature as a common theme, as it conveys the appreciation that i have for it so perfectly.

[James Biser · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy the rhythm and internal rhymes of Wordsworth. His poetry is a melody of words.

[Afeefah]

uni readinggg

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting old English poetry about the different depths of love and human existence. I enjoyed reading about how much he loves sleep.

[Michelle Vaughn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know I'll feel better if I go outside, William, but I'm in the middle of a Gilmore Girls rewatch.

[Alasdair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unlike most of my peers, I enjoyed Wordsworth at school, and I thought I would revisit the whole of the volume from which we read a selection for our A Level. It is mixed - some piercing, brilliant and liquid; some too self-conscious, becoming fussy and forced, occasionally verging into the style of Thomas Thorne from Ghosts. But the good is very good. As a poet of nature and man's place in it, and an observer of the emotional bonds between landscape and inhabitant, he is extraordinary (if of his rather paternalistic time). What is clear from the collection is that his creative energy dims over time, though. The early Lyrical Ballads are wonderful; the later Prelude's grandeur has not aged so well, and later Wordsworth finds much more success in his sonnets. He never really, though, recaptures the restless, wandering energy of his young, roving self. (And we can all have a bad day; even the younger Wordsworth finds himself in a Pooterish moment writing, of a small puddle, 'I've measured it from side to side; | 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide'.)

[Whiskey Tango · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like several other romantic poets, William Wordsworth is a paradox. He aimed to celebrate the changeless things in nature and man. Yet, he writes with a strange boldness and originality that are bracing or unsettling depending upon how willingly we accept a new kind of poetry.

If Wordsworth no longer startles moderns, it is because so many later poets have made his strategies familiar, especially his habit of philosophizing from natural emblems. Wordsworth embarked on his most creative period by trying to chasten and chastize 18C poetry, using a language of limpid, plate-glass purity freed from mannered artifice. Yet his own manner was so distinctive that he is among the most parodied poets.

Wordsworth was born in Northwest England, the scenic Lake District he was to make famous. His mother died when he was 8 and his father died when he was 13, confirming what I believe is the profound effect on the sensitivity and imagination of children who are made vulnerable by the death of a parent. In his lifetime (1770-1850), despite the fact that he had not published, Wordsworth was considered, along with Byron, one of the two pivotal figures of English romanticism, Wordsworth once defied the imagination, which he considered the highest faculty of the creative mind, as something which "produces impressive effects out of simple elements."

After spending time in the Alps and upon seeing London which he found a phantasmagoria and, the antithesis of the stable grandeur and dignity of his native hills, Wordsworth spent his life as a bachelor (after fathering a child with a Frenchwoman whom) Wordsworth and his beloved sister Dorothy moved in together, and she helped restore his mental health and remained with him to old age.

The friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge became one of the most fruitful in literary history. They conceived together both a new poetic style and a whole new rationale of what poetry should do. Poetry was to be an agency not of mere diversion but of profound truth in an imaginative union that would spiritually enlighten and heal. Wordsworth treated everyday subjects the medium would be an honest language really spoken by men, cleansed of unfunctional conventionality. Oddly, one of the things that obscures the purpose in many of Wordsworth poems is the very simplicity of the language; one of the hardest things in reading his works is to concentrate on the behavior of words that seem not to be doing anything special at all.

The typical movement of Wordsworth's major works is the oscillation: between observation of the external scene and introspective analysis of feelings; between experiences and ideas they generate; between the remembered past and present circumstances; between a personal confession ("I") and universal truths ("we"). We need to keep this back-and-forth movement in mind when we call Wordsworth a nature poet. Though it is everywhere in his work, nature rarely appears simply for its own sake. Rather nature is a mythic emblem-of a mysterious, perhaps divine presence, of a dynamic of steady order in the universe, and especially of the development and experience of individuals.

Moreover, nature can cut two ways. It is beauty. It is fear. Wordsworth is a poet of joy but also of the deepest anxiety. Wordsworth's subject is not ultimately nature but the psyche. Wordsworth substitutes imagination for religion for nature is Wordsworth's epic, the providential force leading him by dark ways to heroism which is the development of imaginative-truly human- power.

[Sir Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

“That men, least sensitive, see, hear, perceive
And cannot choose but feel.”

Yes, if you’re going to read Wordsworth you’re going to have to stomach stuff like the above. I read the entirety of the Prelude over the course of two years. At times I could not bear to read another stanza. To me, the poem veered wildly between passages of stunning beauty and clarity, longwinded lectures about politics, quaint discourses on “Man” and the “Ideal,” and a few others motifs. I could distill the situation of the Prelude thus: When Wordsworth sticks to describing direct phenomena (i.e., when he’s writing as a painter, using mostly his eyes), the Prelude can be amazing; but when his opinions and, worse, his sentiments and feelings get involved, the poem can be very painful to read.

And how wooden his personality is compared to, say, Blake or Keats! This is why the poem is at its best when Wordsworth chucks off his boring personage and loses it in the contemplation of “Nature.”

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wordsworth is a writer that I ignored for many years, since he seemed to fall into the category of crusty old English poets who are so iconic that their work has been used to fuel Monty Python sketches, to wit:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host, of golden worker ants.

But I finally made the effort to actually read Wordworth's original verses, and I'm glad I did. His mystical approach to the English landscape is powerful and deeply felt, and although some of his subjects are particular to historic events that occurred in his own lifetime, the bulk of his work remains relevant. For a reader who is sensitive to the ancient magic of unspoiled landscapes, Wordsworth remains a gifted and articulate visionary.

[Nicholas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this when I was in a super romanticist phase a few years ago and while I've calmed down in that respect, Wordsworth can still make me emotional. I love the meaning and attention he gives to the smallest details of the world, including unspectacular people. I share a lot of his appreciation for nature, quiet, and childlike joys. His more melancholic poems are never very depressing, rather they rest on a kind of fundamental appreciation of the world.



I have, however, yet to make it through the "Prelude", and I'm kind of glad he focused on other things instead of finishing an autobiographical philosophical poem about his entire life.

[Andres · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not much to say, his stylish writing and unique view of the main topics in life (love, hate, honor, etc) is just overwhelming.

"She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely Apparition, sent
To be a moment´s ornament;
Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair;
Like Twilight´s, too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From Maytime and the cheerful Dawn
A dancing Shape, an Image Gay,
To haunt, to startle, and waylay"

I suggest to read "Character of the Happy Warrior"