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The Excursion 1814
Though displaced in the eyes of twentieth-century readers by the Prelude (written 1798-1805, but unknown to the poet's contemporaries), the Excursion was for three generations Wordsworth's major work. It had bulk, gravitas, sonorous (sometimes beautiful) blank verse, epic pretensions. Published in 1814, it debated in the persons of the Wanderer, Pastor and Solitary the big questions of the the effects of the French and industrial revolutions, education, man in his relation to nature, society, God. As Wordsworth's reputation grew in the 1820s and '30s, the Excursion came, almost ex officio, to seem the grandest poem since Paradise lost. The text of 1814, like the Prelude text of 1805, was later weakened by revision. Reprinted here for the first time, it should go far to explain why Keats numbered the Excursion among the 'three things to rejoice at in [his] Age.'
- GenresPoetry
480 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1814
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115 people want to read
About the author
William Wordsworth
2,209 books1,384 followersWilliam 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 17, 2025
The Romantic movement kicked off with a denial of the famous classical dictum - to seek in your self-expression to please AND instruct. Nonsense, said Keats, Rossini and Saint-Saens: no, now is the time to please! Put the books away...
TEMPUS EST JOCUNDUM! But Wordsworth alone disagreed.
Now, the notes to this dense and problematic work state that its long, searching and thoughtful poetic journey was of particular comfort to the unquiet minds of the Victorians.
Indeed, as the grim and brutal effects of the Industrial Revolution became apparent in that second decade of the 19th century, even artists like Beethoven - whose art was maturing concurrently with Wordsworth’s - gave voice to a new angst and world-weariness in their works.
The machine age had dawned, and though at the dawn of Romanticism poets like Wordsworth had fled progress through natural pantheism, it was becoming more and more apparent as they aged that the only valid retreat was through an active social conscience.
So this crown of Wordsworth’s middle years is infinitely more socially engaged than early masterpieces like the Lyrical Ballads.
No longer a merely pantheistic nature-lover, Wordsworth now finds wisdom in an Anglican sense of charity that has its roots in the New Testament.
His panacea to pain and suffering is no longer stoic self-absorption, but clearly-understood faith and hope for a better world.
Gone are the wise ancients who earlier populated his poems, finding stoic refuge in rustic tasks.
Now we have old fellow-sufferers who listen to, and commiserate with, the lost and dispossessed around them.
Don’t you think Wordsworth was aging well?
You know, Pop Christian culture is always harping on the importance of good works. But you know where charity begins?
At home!
And one work of charity we can all do - and really, should do, if we want our civilisation to survive - is to JUST LISTEN. Within our family and our neighbourhood. And our World.
People nowadays REALLY need Good Listeners. And that’s what Wordsworth had learned two hundred years ago. The Excursion is really a series of long, carefully considered Conversations among friends.
Another book I just can’t recommend too highly is The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth - William’s sister. In it, she describes her journeys with her older brother in great and amusing detail.
William Wordsworth loved to TALK to people, especially as he reached senior citizen status. And the same slow, loving attention he had always given natural landscapes he now also delightedly devoted to people’s thoughts and ruminations.
He had become a Good Listener - and, if we want to create a better world, THAT should be our cornerstone!
***
Yes, and now, as Wordsworth’s more active creative years declined into the steady life of a good, solid citizen, his life produced less volume of work, and was less enthusiastic about most so-called ideals -
But it was now much wiser, more taciturn - and Much More Human.
He now cared deeply not only for Nature - but also for People.
And isn’t THAT the way we all have to go?
Especially if we value this planet!
TEMPUS EST JOCUNDUM! But Wordsworth alone disagreed.
Now, the notes to this dense and problematic work state that its long, searching and thoughtful poetic journey was of particular comfort to the unquiet minds of the Victorians.
Indeed, as the grim and brutal effects of the Industrial Revolution became apparent in that second decade of the 19th century, even artists like Beethoven - whose art was maturing concurrently with Wordsworth’s - gave voice to a new angst and world-weariness in their works.
The machine age had dawned, and though at the dawn of Romanticism poets like Wordsworth had fled progress through natural pantheism, it was becoming more and more apparent as they aged that the only valid retreat was through an active social conscience.
So this crown of Wordsworth’s middle years is infinitely more socially engaged than early masterpieces like the Lyrical Ballads.
No longer a merely pantheistic nature-lover, Wordsworth now finds wisdom in an Anglican sense of charity that has its roots in the New Testament.
His panacea to pain and suffering is no longer stoic self-absorption, but clearly-understood faith and hope for a better world.
Gone are the wise ancients who earlier populated his poems, finding stoic refuge in rustic tasks.
Now we have old fellow-sufferers who listen to, and commiserate with, the lost and dispossessed around them.
Don’t you think Wordsworth was aging well?
You know, Pop Christian culture is always harping on the importance of good works. But you know where charity begins?
At home!
And one work of charity we can all do - and really, should do, if we want our civilisation to survive - is to JUST LISTEN. Within our family and our neighbourhood. And our World.
People nowadays REALLY need Good Listeners. And that’s what Wordsworth had learned two hundred years ago. The Excursion is really a series of long, carefully considered Conversations among friends.
Another book I just can’t recommend too highly is The Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth - William’s sister. In it, she describes her journeys with her older brother in great and amusing detail.
William Wordsworth loved to TALK to people, especially as he reached senior citizen status. And the same slow, loving attention he had always given natural landscapes he now also delightedly devoted to people’s thoughts and ruminations.
He had become a Good Listener - and, if we want to create a better world, THAT should be our cornerstone!
***
Yes, and now, as Wordsworth’s more active creative years declined into the steady life of a good, solid citizen, his life produced less volume of work, and was less enthusiastic about most so-called ideals -
But it was now much wiser, more taciturn - and Much More Human.
He now cared deeply not only for Nature - but also for People.
And isn’t THAT the way we all have to go?
Especially if we value this planet!
October 31, 2021
FINALLY it is over. At first I was kind of interested to give Wordsworth another try, especially as the monograph that brought me to The Excursion was interesting in itself, but no, I found this poem a frustrating combination of boring and unpleasant. Emblematic was the two books they spent standing around a graveyard telling the sad stories of people buried there: I am prepared to be interested in these little tales, especially when they are sometimes in conversation with the period's ghost stories and crime narratives, but they were so repetitive I kept skimming. I don't know why it bothers me so much that women are never really human in WW, since the male characters are equally concepts without flesh, but maybe it's his take on female virtue that does it. I also think the length gets in his way: I finally understand the 18thC critiques that his poetry was too much like prose; it made me miss Alexander Pope, who is at least having fun with it all. I'm really not sure why I am giving 2 stars instead of 1, except out of a dim sense that 1 star would be "too harsh", but I did not enjoy reading this, did not find myself edified, and would not recommend it even to lovers of Wordsworth.
November 27, 2017
Because I like long narrative poems, I thought it was time to revisit 'The Excursion' which I last looked at in 1973. I must have put it down at the end of Book 6 as my marginalia gives out after that.
If we reduce the possibly sublime to the ridiculous for a moment, then this is a story about a narrator who goes for a walk with a friend called the Wanderer. They pick up The Solitary on the way, discuss despondency and its possible remedies. They meet a Pastor and spend quite a long time looking at graves. Then they have a meal at the rectory, go for a row on Windermere, apostrophize the sunset and go home.
On the whole, I enjoyed the solidity of the verse, really enjoyed it: there's a kind of effete muscularity to it. Nevertheless, the periodic sentences often made it hard to understand, and I came away without much notion of what the hell these blokes were talking about. The passages that were hardest for me were those concerning 'Despondency' and 'Despondency Corrected'; those which involved the Pastor's stories of the lives of those who now are dead were more straightforward and therefore, for me, carried more meaning and passion.
It would be easy simply to dismiss Wordsworth's sententious, plodding narrative as having no intellectual merit, but I will resist that because I clearly need to re-read the bits I found difficult to give them a fair hearing (though to my ear, they would sound wonderful). I didn't really get the thinking behind a lot of it, but concluded that, at the end, Wordsworth was asseverating that he believes in some sort of melding of Christian God and Pantheistic Entity. Be that as it may, there was a certain conventionality and stolidity about his thinking that I didn't find sympathetic, and I began also to tire of his descriptions of the natural world in language that acquired a weighty artificiality - artful, but lacking a spring in its step. Well, why should it all be 'inspired'? No reason at all, but that ponderous polysyllabic style was sometimes a bit much however sonorously and pleasingly it crept into my ears.
If we reduce the possibly sublime to the ridiculous for a moment, then this is a story about a narrator who goes for a walk with a friend called the Wanderer. They pick up The Solitary on the way, discuss despondency and its possible remedies. They meet a Pastor and spend quite a long time looking at graves. Then they have a meal at the rectory, go for a row on Windermere, apostrophize the sunset and go home.
On the whole, I enjoyed the solidity of the verse, really enjoyed it: there's a kind of effete muscularity to it. Nevertheless, the periodic sentences often made it hard to understand, and I came away without much notion of what the hell these blokes were talking about. The passages that were hardest for me were those concerning 'Despondency' and 'Despondency Corrected'; those which involved the Pastor's stories of the lives of those who now are dead were more straightforward and therefore, for me, carried more meaning and passion.
It would be easy simply to dismiss Wordsworth's sententious, plodding narrative as having no intellectual merit, but I will resist that because I clearly need to re-read the bits I found difficult to give them a fair hearing (though to my ear, they would sound wonderful). I didn't really get the thinking behind a lot of it, but concluded that, at the end, Wordsworth was asseverating that he believes in some sort of melding of Christian God and Pantheistic Entity. Be that as it may, there was a certain conventionality and stolidity about his thinking that I didn't find sympathetic, and I began also to tire of his descriptions of the natural world in language that acquired a weighty artificiality - artful, but lacking a spring in its step. Well, why should it all be 'inspired'? No reason at all, but that ponderous polysyllabic style was sometimes a bit much however sonorously and pleasingly it crept into my ears.
February 27, 2019
Difficult reading; often, it takes me several pages of reading to get into Wordsworth's pace, but then it is beautiful and worth the time. I love the lines in the 9th book regarding the two boys fishing and their little sister.
June 10, 2022
It's a boring poem. But it's a very illuminating poem.
Would I suggest anyone to read this without a deep interest in romanticism/nineteenth century studies or Wordsworth? No.
The first two books however are great poetry, regardless of a deep-seated interest in Romanticism. The rest are largely rhetorical dialogues told through anecdotes and recollections from the principal characters. Which is why it's not really great poetry. But it certainly doesn't leave you in doubt about what isn't good. What is good and worthy? That's the bit it isn't committed to giving one answer to, apart from the need to develop a system of National Education to inculcate virtue. If you've read Wordsworth's Convention on Cintra (half a decade before The Excursion) you already know this. I'm the worst kind of reviewer for this kind of poem. Thankfully, this is basically a public diary!
Would I suggest anyone to read this without a deep interest in romanticism/nineteenth century studies or Wordsworth? No.
The first two books however are great poetry, regardless of a deep-seated interest in Romanticism. The rest are largely rhetorical dialogues told through anecdotes and recollections from the principal characters. Which is why it's not really great poetry. But it certainly doesn't leave you in doubt about what isn't good. What is good and worthy? That's the bit it isn't committed to giving one answer to, apart from the need to develop a system of National Education to inculcate virtue. If you've read Wordsworth's Convention on Cintra (half a decade before The Excursion) you already know this. I'm the worst kind of reviewer for this kind of poem. Thankfully, this is basically a public diary!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews