Book description
One of the major poets of Romanticism, Wordsworth epitomized the
spirit of his age with his celebration of the natural world and the
spontanous expression of feeling. This volume contains a rich
selection from the most creative phase of his life, including extracts
from his masterpiece, The Prelude, and the best-loved of his shorter
poems such as 'Composed Upon Westminster Bridge', 'Tintern Abbey', 'I
Wandered Lonely as a Cloud', 'Lucy Gray', and 'Michael'.
Together these poems demonstrate not only Wordsworth's astonishing
range and power, but the sustained and coherent vision that informed
his work.
William Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth in the Lake
District and educated at Cambridge. As a young man he was fired with
enthusiasm for the French Revolution but the year he spent in France
after graduating left him disillusioned with radical politics. He
turned more seriously to literature and, in collaboration with his
friend Coleridge, produced Lyrical Ballads (1798). His return to the
Lake District in 1799 marked the beginning of his most productive
period as a poet, during which he wrote his most famous long poem, The
Prelude (1805).
Stephen Gill a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University
and a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He holds degrees from Oxford
and Edinburgh Universities and is a long-serving member of the
Wordsworth Trust. He has written William Wordsworth: A Life (1989) and
Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998).
