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Selected Poetry
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 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.
252 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 2008
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About the author
William Wordsworth
2,169 books1,373 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 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 24, 2017
Over the last few years I have been very unfair to Wordsworth. I’ve avoided him when possible because many of his poems are overly sentimental and just ponder over his conception of nature. However, the more of his poems I read the more complex his ideas become; his words go beyond simple nature admiration, and push into the realms of environmentalist thought.
I especially like the idea of humanity’s place on earth in the poem “Brothers.” Wordsworth suggests that we are all mere tourists. Everything he uses in the poem to describe the natural world is associated with the immortal and the enduring whereas humanity is associated with the ever changing. The landscape is littered with objects of human death such as gravestones and old churches. It’s a stark contrast, a reminder that whilst we will be here for a short time the landscape, the natural world, will endure:
"These Tourists, heaven preserve us! needs must live
A profitable life: some glance along,
Rapid and gay, as if the earth were air,
And they were butterflies to wheel about
Long as the summer lasted: some, as wise,
Perched on the forehead of a jutting crag,
Pencil in hand and book upon the knee,
Will look and scribble, scribble on and look,
Until a man might travel twelve stout miles,
Or reap an acre of his neighbour's corn."
In the poem the natural world is also evocative of memory, an ideal Wordsworth explores much further in his Prelude. Natural scenes trigger thoughts from long ago and remind the observer of a past self, of someone who has since grown and changed. The memories are not always joyful, as they are in “Tintern Abbey.” Some are full of heartache and bring forth feelings of loss and isolation, which in itself is something I’ve not seen much of in Wordsworth. Many of his poems are just full of optimism and simplicity. His exploration of memory is perceptive and powerful here.
“For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.”
I will always prefer the writing of Percy Shelley, though in here are some absolutely masterful pieces of poetry. Wordsworth clearly helped to shape the poets that came after; his ideas helped to give birth to a new intellectual context that subsequent poets could challenge, revise and expand upon and, dare I say it, even improve.
I’m going to be reading through Lyrical Ballads over the next few days, the collection written with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I’m hoping to find some more good pieces in there too.
I especially like the idea of humanity’s place on earth in the poem “Brothers.” Wordsworth suggests that we are all mere tourists. Everything he uses in the poem to describe the natural world is associated with the immortal and the enduring whereas humanity is associated with the ever changing. The landscape is littered with objects of human death such as gravestones and old churches. It’s a stark contrast, a reminder that whilst we will be here for a short time the landscape, the natural world, will endure:
"These Tourists, heaven preserve us! needs must live
A profitable life: some glance along,
Rapid and gay, as if the earth were air,
And they were butterflies to wheel about
Long as the summer lasted: some, as wise,
Perched on the forehead of a jutting crag,
Pencil in hand and book upon the knee,
Will look and scribble, scribble on and look,
Until a man might travel twelve stout miles,
Or reap an acre of his neighbour's corn."
In the poem the natural world is also evocative of memory, an ideal Wordsworth explores much further in his Prelude. Natural scenes trigger thoughts from long ago and remind the observer of a past self, of someone who has since grown and changed. The memories are not always joyful, as they are in “Tintern Abbey.” Some are full of heartache and bring forth feelings of loss and isolation, which in itself is something I’ve not seen much of in Wordsworth. Many of his poems are just full of optimism and simplicity. His exploration of memory is perceptive and powerful here.
“For I have learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity.”
I will always prefer the writing of Percy Shelley, though in here are some absolutely masterful pieces of poetry. Wordsworth clearly helped to shape the poets that came after; his ideas helped to give birth to a new intellectual context that subsequent poets could challenge, revise and expand upon and, dare I say it, even improve.
I’m going to be reading through Lyrical Ballads over the next few days, the collection written with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I’m hoping to find some more good pieces in there too.
Read
February 5, 2022I had bought this volume some years ago, perhaps about ten or so, hoping to remedy at least a tiny portion of the deficiencies in my education. I had read a few poems but had not taken to them greatly. Now that I currently engaged in my great clear out, I thought this was a prime candidate for my read and release programme, and I thought a great idea would be to read one poem a day and so slowly work through the book. The second poem was already rather long, and to my taste, tedious. So I determined on a fresh approach - that I would read it from back to front, which is the way that I often read newspapers.
This volume finishes with excerpts from The Prelude, which as the title suggests, was intended as the prelude to a much longer poem which Wordsworth never wrote, instead he laboured over his prelude which dealt with his childhood, youth and maturation. I found this fascinating reading. Partly because it's format - verse divided into thirteen books - suggested the Epic; but dealing with the development of one young person into a poet rather than wars beneath the walls of Troy, or across central Italy, or of Satan's fateful rebellion against God. While it's Virgilian evocation of the landscapes of Cumbria and particularly around the river Derwent struck me as (unintentionally) humorous, since have no plans to be in that region I hope that the genii locorum will have forgotten my impious laughter by the time I get there, otherwise I will no doubt be subjected to rain, hail, strong winds and other typical features of the weather in the Lake district.
Anyway the whole struck me as a moving and powerful endeavour, suggesting to me that I had best keep the book, but as I worked my way poem by poem towards the front I found less and less that pleased me, so perhaps I am best to dumped the selected poetry and search for an edition of The Prelude instead.
I was attracted to the verses St Paul's, Composed upon London Bridge and London, 1802, the rest moved me not at all, sometimes I had the feeling that the poems had been revised with lines rewritten at later dates, sometimes they felt terribly long, interesting historically in their representation of Cumbrian poverty but they all lacked what I found in the Prelude where his struggle was to explain or perhaps even understand himself, the mind in a landscape, and the slow expansion of both. Perhaps also I could see how the Prelude looked back, but also it reminded me of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian poems, and since they please me, this pleased me too.
This volume finishes with excerpts from The Prelude, which as the title suggests, was intended as the prelude to a much longer poem which Wordsworth never wrote, instead he laboured over his prelude which dealt with his childhood, youth and maturation. I found this fascinating reading. Partly because it's format - verse divided into thirteen books - suggested the Epic; but dealing with the development of one young person into a poet rather than wars beneath the walls of Troy, or across central Italy, or of Satan's fateful rebellion against God. While it's Virgilian evocation of the landscapes of Cumbria and particularly around the river Derwent struck me as (unintentionally) humorous, since have no plans to be in that region I hope that the genii locorum will have forgotten my impious laughter by the time I get there, otherwise I will no doubt be subjected to rain, hail, strong winds and other typical features of the weather in the Lake district.
Anyway the whole struck me as a moving and powerful endeavour, suggesting to me that I had best keep the book, but as I worked my way poem by poem towards the front I found less and less that pleased me, so perhaps I am best to dumped the selected poetry and search for an edition of The Prelude instead.
I was attracted to the verses St Paul's, Composed upon London Bridge and London, 1802, the rest moved me not at all, sometimes I had the feeling that the poems had been revised with lines rewritten at later dates, sometimes they felt terribly long, interesting historically in their representation of Cumbrian poverty but they all lacked what I found in the Prelude where his struggle was to explain or perhaps even understand himself, the mind in a landscape, and the slow expansion of both. Perhaps also I could see how the Prelude looked back, but also it reminded me of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian poems, and since they please me, this pleased me too.
April 29, 2013
***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.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.ph...
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.
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.ph...
April 24, 2024
2.5/5
I said I’d do it.
This is probably one of the most taxing reads I’ll finish this year. Half the poems are blank verse which is fun as it differs from typical/“traditional” poetry (what even is that anyways?), but they’re also extremely dense in information and rhetoric; I just couldn’t keep up with it half the time. The other half of poems were great! and I really really got a thrill reading them. Also “The Prelude” was a bitch to get through. I think I will tackle it some other time, but that won’t be for years.
Anyways here are my favorite poems from this collection:
“A Night-Piece”
“Lines Written at a Small Distance from my House”
“The Thorn”
“The Idiot Boy”
“Lines written in Early Spring”
“Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey”
“The Two April Mornings”
“Lucy Gray”
“The Brothers”
from “Poems on the Naming of Places — to Joanna”
“Michael”
“‘These chairs they have no words to utter’”
“Resolution and Independence”
“‘Within our happy Castle there dwelt one’”
“‘She was a Phantom of delight’”
“Ode (‘There was a time’)”
“The Solitary Reaper”
“Airey-Force Valley”
“Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg”
I said I’d do it.
This is probably one of the most taxing reads I’ll finish this year. Half the poems are blank verse which is fun as it differs from typical/“traditional” poetry (what even is that anyways?), but they’re also extremely dense in information and rhetoric; I just couldn’t keep up with it half the time. The other half of poems were great! and I really really got a thrill reading them. Also “The Prelude” was a bitch to get through. I think I will tackle it some other time, but that won’t be for years.
Anyways here are my favorite poems from this collection:
“A Night-Piece”
“Lines Written at a Small Distance from my House”
“The Thorn”
“The Idiot Boy”
“Lines written in Early Spring”
“Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey”
“The Two April Mornings”
“Lucy Gray”
“The Brothers”
from “Poems on the Naming of Places — to Joanna”
“Michael”
“‘These chairs they have no words to utter’”
“Resolution and Independence”
“‘Within our happy Castle there dwelt one’”
“‘She was a Phantom of delight’”
“Ode (‘There was a time’)”
“The Solitary Reaper”
“Airey-Force Valley”
“Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg”
December 26, 2019
God damn, took me over five years to finish this. In fairness, while I did start reading in 2014, I took a five-year break about halfway through the book, so in total it probably only actually took a couple weeks.
The poetry collected here is pretty great, which should be obvious because of Wordsworth's influence on English poetry, English-language poetry in a more general sense, and Romanticism in a more specific sense. Unfortunately, the collection is a bit neutered, as it picks and chooses from the entirety of Wordsworth's oeuvre, rather than compile everything (the volume is, after all, titled "Selected Poetry"). The main downside to the culling is that Wordsworth's magnum opus, The Prelude, does not appear in full, and is instead cut to pieces, making it somewhat hard to follow, forcing the Reader to skim the Aesthetic surface (which is fine, I suppose, but I was kinda getting into Wordsworth's life story).
Beyond the segmented Prelude, my favorite poem here is probably "A slumber did my spirit seal," one of the shortest pieces, and one I actually really know from a song by gothic death-doom band Draconian, whom I discovered in like ninth grade after listening to a wee bit of Katatonia and My Dying Bride (and so before I started listening to "real" gothic rock, and then more generally post-punk). Indeed, I think I bought this volume, or otherwise got it for free, from a library close-out sale thing sometime during my high school years. I don't recall clearly, but I think I picked the volume up simply because it seemed "lofty" for its 18th-century Romantic charms, and I guess I wanted to become more "cultured" during a time when I was mostly reading Bret Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. And yet, the book went unread for a couple years, before I returned to Jacksonville from a brief time at UCF, and was immensely bored, and decided to read some older books I had before diving into too many of the newer things I bought in my sophomore year (during which time I changed my major to English).
There were three reasons why I came back to this book after so long: 1) it had been sitting in my "Currently Reading" shelf, taking up space for half a decade; 2) I'd read a handful of volumes of Modern poetry in the past couple months, and figured it was a decent idea to step backward in Time; 3) a bit of a small stretch, but I recently rewatched Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, a favorite film of mine, and one I believe to be incredibly capital-B Beautiful, to the point that I would say Malick is as much a Romanticist as the film medium would allow (I also love The New World), and I felt I needed to read more actual Romanticism in order to substantiate that claim. And so I did.
I don't want to dwell too much on the Malick comparison, but a Big Thing I like about the man's cinema is that he just really likes to shoot grass and other greenery, a favorite "motif" (if it could be called that) being scenes of sunlight filtering down through high tree branches. Through an appreciation of Malick, I've developed this idea that my favorite color is the deep green of grass in the late afternoon, under an overcast sky (something which is seen in The Thin Red Line, though I believe I had this thought somewhat independently). Wordsworth, in writing about his life and the lives of shepherds and things, talks a lot about grass and trees and rivers and mountains. Probably par for the Romantic course, and rightfully so. In theory, I could read about people admiring grass all day. In practice, it gets rather tiresome to read so many poems in a row that are all about dickriding Nature. But my response is less to criticize Wordsworth and his fellows, and more to cast a dejected glance toward Modernity, to blame my inability to sit still for a dozen successive Wordsworth poems on the fact that I've been raised around too many buildings, that I've read the back half of this collection while in the tallest skyscraper in my city, on my lunch break at a menial office job where I have an ungodly amount of free-time on my hands, most of which I waste on staring at the Internet, a job which I don't actively dislike but which makes it really, really hard to read Pessoa's Book of Disquiet without angst-ing something hardcore. But I digress.
There is a mystique to Romanticism that I do not believe can revive itself in this era. Not sure if this line of thought is an off-shoot from a general sense of cynicism and Irony. In recent years, I've sought nothing other than pure Sincerity, which I think I can easily find in Romantic poetry, but then there are times when I'm faced with sonnets bound to particular rhyme schemes, or I'm reading the blank-verse Prelude line-by-line in its metre and it feels goofy, goofier than if I read it "as prose" (which is to say "reading to each pause or full-stop, regardless of line-break"). I complain vocally often about contemporary poetry being non-poetic, but then I read "real" poetry and complain (quietly, to myself) about it following rigid structures, and it's especially weird because you have this worship of Nature locked into societal conformity, but you have contemporary IdPol tripe flowing freely, and it's just weird. I don't know what I'm writing about now, but it's hardly about Wordsworth.
Props to having the greatest surname a writer could ever have!
The poetry collected here is pretty great, which should be obvious because of Wordsworth's influence on English poetry, English-language poetry in a more general sense, and Romanticism in a more specific sense. Unfortunately, the collection is a bit neutered, as it picks and chooses from the entirety of Wordsworth's oeuvre, rather than compile everything (the volume is, after all, titled "Selected Poetry"). The main downside to the culling is that Wordsworth's magnum opus, The Prelude, does not appear in full, and is instead cut to pieces, making it somewhat hard to follow, forcing the Reader to skim the Aesthetic surface (which is fine, I suppose, but I was kinda getting into Wordsworth's life story).
Beyond the segmented Prelude, my favorite poem here is probably "A slumber did my spirit seal," one of the shortest pieces, and one I actually really know from a song by gothic death-doom band Draconian, whom I discovered in like ninth grade after listening to a wee bit of Katatonia and My Dying Bride (and so before I started listening to "real" gothic rock, and then more generally post-punk). Indeed, I think I bought this volume, or otherwise got it for free, from a library close-out sale thing sometime during my high school years. I don't recall clearly, but I think I picked the volume up simply because it seemed "lofty" for its 18th-century Romantic charms, and I guess I wanted to become more "cultured" during a time when I was mostly reading Bret Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk. And yet, the book went unread for a couple years, before I returned to Jacksonville from a brief time at UCF, and was immensely bored, and decided to read some older books I had before diving into too many of the newer things I bought in my sophomore year (during which time I changed my major to English).
There were three reasons why I came back to this book after so long: 1) it had been sitting in my "Currently Reading" shelf, taking up space for half a decade; 2) I'd read a handful of volumes of Modern poetry in the past couple months, and figured it was a decent idea to step backward in Time; 3) a bit of a small stretch, but I recently rewatched Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, a favorite film of mine, and one I believe to be incredibly capital-B Beautiful, to the point that I would say Malick is as much a Romanticist as the film medium would allow (I also love The New World), and I felt I needed to read more actual Romanticism in order to substantiate that claim. And so I did.
I don't want to dwell too much on the Malick comparison, but a Big Thing I like about the man's cinema is that he just really likes to shoot grass and other greenery, a favorite "motif" (if it could be called that) being scenes of sunlight filtering down through high tree branches. Through an appreciation of Malick, I've developed this idea that my favorite color is the deep green of grass in the late afternoon, under an overcast sky (something which is seen in The Thin Red Line, though I believe I had this thought somewhat independently). Wordsworth, in writing about his life and the lives of shepherds and things, talks a lot about grass and trees and rivers and mountains. Probably par for the Romantic course, and rightfully so. In theory, I could read about people admiring grass all day. In practice, it gets rather tiresome to read so many poems in a row that are all about dickriding Nature. But my response is less to criticize Wordsworth and his fellows, and more to cast a dejected glance toward Modernity, to blame my inability to sit still for a dozen successive Wordsworth poems on the fact that I've been raised around too many buildings, that I've read the back half of this collection while in the tallest skyscraper in my city, on my lunch break at a menial office job where I have an ungodly amount of free-time on my hands, most of which I waste on staring at the Internet, a job which I don't actively dislike but which makes it really, really hard to read Pessoa's Book of Disquiet without angst-ing something hardcore. But I digress.
There is a mystique to Romanticism that I do not believe can revive itself in this era. Not sure if this line of thought is an off-shoot from a general sense of cynicism and Irony. In recent years, I've sought nothing other than pure Sincerity, which I think I can easily find in Romantic poetry, but then there are times when I'm faced with sonnets bound to particular rhyme schemes, or I'm reading the blank-verse Prelude line-by-line in its metre and it feels goofy, goofier than if I read it "as prose" (which is to say "reading to each pause or full-stop, regardless of line-break"). I complain vocally often about contemporary poetry being non-poetic, but then I read "real" poetry and complain (quietly, to myself) about it following rigid structures, and it's especially weird because you have this worship of Nature locked into societal conformity, but you have contemporary IdPol tripe flowing freely, and it's just weird. I don't know what I'm writing about now, but it's hardly about Wordsworth.
Props to having the greatest surname a writer could ever have!
September 23, 2023
'the mad mother' slays
May 5, 2022
In all honesty there is nothing more delightful than romantic poetry.
This work of selected poetry let's you dive into an old era of love and life all pleasing to read by yourself or with others.
This work of selected poetry let's you dive into an old era of love and life all pleasing to read by yourself or with others.
March 17, 2017
Hermoso libro, una genial recopilación de grandes poemas, muy íntimos, emotivos, musicales, pastorales. Historias que conmueven, imágenes de paisajes y de quietud rural, momentos del día y de la naturaleza, paz y tranquilidad, pasados emotivos. No todos los poemas me gustaron por igual. Pero me ha logrado emocionar, Wordsworth, hasta hacerse querer.
He dejado este libro en el viejo continente antes de venirme para Argentina, y no tengo los poemas a mano para expresar mi amor por varios de ellos. No tengo los nombres siquiera. Pero me han dejado una hermosa marca y grandes recuerdos. Muy recomendado.
He dejado este libro en el viejo continente antes de venirme para Argentina, y no tengo los poemas a mano para expresar mi amor por varios de ellos. No tengo los nombres siquiera. Pero me han dejado una hermosa marca y grandes recuerdos. Muy recomendado.
February 7, 2022
Some of my favourite poems (though not all):
Old Man Travelling
The Ruined Cottage
A Night-Piece
The Discharged Soldier
Lines Written at a Small Distance from my House
Lines written in Early Spring
Anecdote for Fathers
We Are Seven
Lines written a few miles Above Tintern Abbey
Nutting
Hart-Leap Well
Home at Grasmere
I travelled among unknown Men
Among all lovely things my Love had been
Travelling
Ode to Duty
Ode ('There was a time')
I wondered lonely as a Cloud
A Complaint
Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg
The Prelude
Old Man Travelling
The Ruined Cottage
A Night-Piece
The Discharged Soldier
Lines Written at a Small Distance from my House
Lines written in Early Spring
Anecdote for Fathers
We Are Seven
Lines written a few miles Above Tintern Abbey
Nutting
Hart-Leap Well
Home at Grasmere
I travelled among unknown Men
Among all lovely things my Love had been
Travelling
Ode to Duty
Ode ('There was a time')
I wondered lonely as a Cloud
A Complaint
Extempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg
The Prelude
July 22, 2020
In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth promotes his poems as being written in the 'common language of men'. The poems in this selection were anything but.
His shorter poems can be quite fetching, however, longer ones are rather irksome: most of them go on a tangent that praises the 'pastoral' world. Wordsworth's idyllic view of 'country life' is laughable.
His shorter poems can be quite fetching, however, longer ones are rather irksome: most of them go on a tangent that praises the 'pastoral' world. Wordsworth's idyllic view of 'country life' is laughable.
November 7, 2015
I'm still not a huge fan of poetry but at least Wordsworth made it a bit more enjoyable than Pope. I loved The Ruined Cottage and The Brothers, however I did find some of the poems slightly repetitive (but I think that might be more of an issue with the collection rather than Wordsworth).
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews