William Wordsworth: Poems Selected by Seamus Heaney

by William Wordsworth, Seamus Heaney (Compiler, Foreword)

In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to the most important poets in our literature.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty . . .

-- Composed Upon Westminster Bridge,
September 3, 1802

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Literature, Nature, School, British Literature

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

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

[Asra Ghouse]

William Wordsworth was greatly inspired by nature. No wonder his poems were the most beautiful of all times. He was a smart, shrewd kid. He learned quickly the importance and significance of early experiences. By his twenties he knew this truth and he developed his greatest works in the next ten years.

"As a poet, he was always at his best while struggling to become a whole person, to reconcile the sense of incoherence and disappointment forced upon him by time and circumstance with those intimations of harmonious communion promised by his childhood visions..." - Seamus Heaney

The poems I loved -
Expostulations and Reply - I must've read this a dozen times and yet it never fades in its rhythmic and philosophical beauty.

Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood - I've read this twice. To sum it up in a word, this is 'life'.

My heart leaps when I behold - Short and sweet, his love for nature.

Three years she grew in sun and shower - Poetry and sadness. Beauty at its best.

All the 'Lucy' poems

The Tables Turned - This seems to me as a reply to Expostulations and Reply. It's witty.

And, of course The Ruined Cottage - There's only one word for this - EPIC.

[Harry Palacio]

Nature poems, from shepherding to tilling and the reaping woman. Wordsworth shapes poetry into sonnets and narrative.

[Amelia Failla]

sylvia plath had more talent in her toenails. can someone please explain to me why one poem “two part prelude” was 30 pages long? in the words of wendy williams, death. you too mrs spears. death, to all of them.

[Jess]

This is a really beautiful book. The cover and the inside cover are gorgeous and the layout of the poetry is beautiful.
There will always be the most famous poems like wandered lonely as a cloud but I was surprised by this collection. Many poems that I have never heard of have become my new favourite.
A couple I love:
Michael
Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm, Painted by Sir George Beaumont.
Goody Blake and Harry Gill

[Nini]

Wordsworth really doing God’s work, bringing pantheism to those entitled, individualistic 17th Century Brits

[Jay Wright]

Wordsworth view of the world is from a natural perspective. He took a trip to the Alps on holiday in 1790 in the French Revolution. I like his views on poetry. I must agree that true poetry is emmotional and is reflected by an emmotional outburts from the author. Science plays its role but life is not complete without looking at the world from a number of perspectives. I can see his characters, the places, the storms, the night. He view of the sublime is one to be considered.

[Annie]

Beautiful!

[Umbar]

I don’t think I’ll ever be a huge poetry fan. The Ruined Cottage and I wandered lonely as a cloud were standouts.

Also a celebrity bookshelf read, shout out to Taylor Swift's The Lakes

[Elijah Freeman]

I'm not a big poetry fan, so reading a book of poetry is always a bit of a slog. However, I found this one easier than most - probably because I've been reading it in the Lake District, surrounded by the landscapes that inspired Wordsworth. He said that his poetry comes from "emotion recollected in tranquility" so this quiet week in the middle of a tumultuous months-long journey also lends itself to the collection.

My favourite poems included the classics like 'The Two-Part Prelude' and 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' which I definitely understand better now. I also really enjoyed the stories in 'The Ruined Cottage' and 'Lucy Gray' that felt like they belonged to a folk story tradition. I was pleasantly surprised by some of the poems about the French Revolution, especially 'French Revolution As It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement.' They felt like they had a hopeful revolutionary tone that is sorely needed in the world at the moment.

I don't know enough about Wordsworth to judge Seamus Heaney's curation of his work. There are a lot of poems that are literally just 'fragments' and a lot of others that feel like they weren't fully formed ideas. Some of these provide helpful insight into Wordsworth's philosophy (like 'Expostulation and Reply') but many of the shorter poems just had no impact on me. I guess maybe that's what I get for choosing a collection of poetry put together by another popular poet. No rating for this one.

[Chesca]

Graceful poetry, full of pastoral, nature themes and sometimes people’s stories. I had a hard time keeping focus through the long, narrative poems. I enjoyed a few of the shorter poems. I don’t feel up to rating this one because I think the experience depends on the kind of poetry reader you are—and I’m just feeling my way around at this point.

[Judine Brey]

While I appreciate the rhythm and language of Wordsworth's poems, it is far too easy for my mind to wander while my brain "reads" words. The most successful poems (at least in maintaining my attention) were by far the narrative poems. It will be joining the forensics library, not my personal one.

[Scott Balta]

30% - jumped around through this and was very disappointed. Style feels totally aged and I don’t think I marked a single poem that I liked. Odd that poetry has positively evolved so much in 150 years while novels arguably have not gotten any better, just more experimental & often in a failed way

[Micah Hunter]

I read enough to get a feel for who Wordsworth is and how he writes. I stopped reading because Wordsworth is a self-professed “worshipper of nature” who, living at the time and place he did, should have known better. Worship God and God alone.

[Vokino]

The highlights for me were:
- Expostulation and Reply
- The Tables Turned
- *The Two-Part Prelude* (excellent!)
- Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

[MelBusMoo]

For the most part joyous and uplifting.

[Scott Bielinski]

Great selections on Heaney's part. I'm glad I picked Wordsworth back up. "Michael" remains my favorite of his poems and revisiting the "Ode" was a marvelous experience.

[ananya]

forget all the shit i talked about not liking poetry guys this lowkey slaps

[pally]

dont we love reading poem books for english

[Sam]

Nature lover. Some sad tales of lonely people also.

[Guenter]

Mostly sad and melacholic - I wandered lonely as a cloud still stands out as far the best

[isggobel]

def see the good moments of his pieces through my own analysis ha but big part of me just thinks this guy didn’t have as much thought behind his poetry that we give him credit for.

[Madeline Miller]

This and a rocking chair overlooking Windermere lakes

[John]

Read the classics!

[MATFiction]

Wondrous. Masterpieces of poetry then and now. Wordsworthian.

[Amy]

I didn't read the entirety, but now at least have the flavor of what Wordsworth is all about. Introductory biographical information was helpful.

[James Kinsley]

A trifle rarified for me. I mean, who am I to give Wordsworth three stars, but this more reflects my experience of reading it than his skill as a poet.

[Jon Margetts]

Gorgeous book, and informative intro from Heaney.

(Second review)

On this read through, I enjoyed spending more time with The Ruined Cottage, Michael (A Pastoral Poem), and Independence and Resolution. It is through these that you find Wordsworth reflecting most upon the impoverished, rural individuals dotted around the Lake District, and the small tragedies that fall upon them. Combined with their tales are rich and moving evocations of the natural landscape in Cumbria.

Unlike Keats, Wordsworth possesses the ability to connect the physicality of mountains, water and sky, and the incumbent fauna, to the intense spirituality he feels for it, rending his almost mystical vision of nature and his position within it richly palpable. This is made all the more authentic because, although on occasion he drops in the odd allusion, Wordsworth refers to real places around him. It's easy to parody his magnificently long titles and subtitles (one of his most well-known poems, Tintern Abbey, is actually written far away from it) but they situate his writing in the real world. They seem more concrete than Keats's imaginative wanderings. Wordsworth also, in contrast, eschews the artifice of poetic language: figurative language does feature, especially in his personification of Liberty, but it doesn't dominate. His diction is straightforward and simple, rendering his work a little bit more accessible.

In many ways, Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (co-written with Coleridge in Alfoxden, Somerset), precipitated today's modern lyricism in poetry, namely the focus upon how the self is realised and the individual consciousness formed. Wordsworth radically hearkens back to his childhood - radical because, up until this point, children were views as merely smaller, less developed adults - as a way of determining and realising how he, as a poet, formed. What's amazing is that, in the Two-Part Prelude, he even recognises that his memories aren't easily delineated, and that the narrative he builds of them is, like any kind of memory, unreliably formed. From that, it's easy to see why his longer version of the Prelude took the majority of his life to write - with such careful thought and philosophic consideration on the nature of memory, he's not going to be publishing at great haste! In Yarrow Unvisited , Wordsworth also suggests that some places are not worth revisiting: if the memory of such a place is left in a pristine and wonderful state, then it can actually prove to be a source of comfort and restoration in the future when visiting it is not an option; to visit it unnecessarily now is to potentially spoil that future potentiality.

Such a view is slightly problematic. If you were to not revisit anywhere because you didn't want to spoil how you say that place, then you'd never leave home! I suppose that one of my other take homes from this reading of this gorgeous collection of well-selected and gorgeously presented poems, is that Wordsworth's views aren't always quite so straight-forward. There is a kind of 'orientalism' simmering underneath his description of the solitary reaper, for example. His underlying conservatism comes forth in his description of London's inherent avarice and greed; this sonnet comes across not so much as critical and poignant, but more as a bit of a whine Contrast his criticisms to the powerful words of Blake's London, and it's world apart. Decrying materialism is one thing; damning the role of national institutions that impoverish and wretch its own citizens is another. I feel like, in his return to London, Wordsworth secretly wished he was wealthy like those around him; indeed, later in life, as Poet Laureate and semi-aristocrat of Rydal Mount, he proved to be quite the figure of the establishment.

Overall, this is a worthy introduction into Wordsworth's poetry.

[Esther Waite]

Andrew Peterson recommends this collection:
“…This little pocket edition lived in my backpack for about a year, and is the reason the chapters of The God of the Garden were structured around Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality.’”

[Sophie]

Usually I enjoy reading very long poems, but this time skipping them felt like self - care.

[Daniel]

Much as I love Wordsworth's poetry, I found this anthology somewhat wanting. To be sure, it contains most of the great English poet's best work, but, like many slender volumes, fails to include notes. Perhaps, this is so the poetry will speak to the individual reader unencumbered by explanation.

Sometimes, however, historical context is necessary so that we know the friend with whom Wordsworth is walking or the historical figures he references.

Not just that, Seamus Heaney, a great poet in his own right, who selected the poems for this anthology, failed to include any verses from the First Book of the 1805 version of the Prelude wherein we found some of Wordsworth's most beautiful lines.

That said, for those un- or less familiar with Wordsworth's works, it is a decent introduction. And hopefully will inspire the reader to seek out more information about the sources of the poet's inspiration.