William Wordsworth Books

I thoroughly enjoyed this tape. Beautiful poetry read by beautiful voices. It's wonderful for playing in the car on long journeys, it could even be the perfect antidote to road rage. Very relaxing.

The Interfact Shakespeare books are the best investment that I ever made. The accompanied books are clearly written without so much focus on footnotes. Every scene is clearly explained to the reader who might have gotten lost along the way to catch up to date. The book also features juicy tidbits of information on the sides but plenty of room for notetaking. This book is probably the best adapted for the student whether middle or high school or even adult to understand it.
The CD rom is the best part of this item. The CD rom has wonderful games, tests, and holds plenty of adventures for those students who might be bored easily. This is the best way to get them involved or interested in Romeo & Juliet.

As any fan of poetry will admit, Wordsworth is perhaps the central figure of poetry of the last two hundred years-- only Whitman contends with him in eminence. I love both (though I am partial to Keats!), and the fame of each is very just and in proportion with their merits.

Wordsworth is a musical poet, in that his verse flows with a beauty of language that has no rival I have yet encountered save perhaps Yeats or Shakespeare. Even the latter two, though better poets than Wordsworth overall in my opinion, fall slightly short of his music. I find many of his poems very easy to commit to memory, because of this quality:

She dwelt among th'untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove.
A maid whom there were none the praise
And very few to love.

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye--
Fair, as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and Oh!
The difference to me.

That is from memory, and I memorized it almost effortlessly; I suspect most can do the same because this poem (one of Wordsworth's "Lucy Poems", some of the best in all literature!) has a certain rhythm and flow to it that makes it as easily committed to memory as song lyrics.

There is in Wordsworth's poems a wonderful depth of thought, as well; common themes include lost youth, nature, and the poet's own mind (Wordsworth was notoriously egotistical). I find him a sadder poet than others do-- many read him as almost superficial or happy and joyous in nature, but I think this is too simplistic, as his poems resonate with a certain loss and regretful inwardness that really reverberates in my mind.

He is commonly considered the greatest of the Romantics, a consensus with which I disagree. I prefer Keats and Blake (Coleridge might have been as good, had he written more!), but Wordsworth has been more of an influence on later poets than either, and I certainly do not shy from calling him among the greatest.

There are too many lines in Wordsworth and too many long poems which today are largely unread. But there is also a body of work within that far vaster world of lines which is great. There are a whole group of poems , including many from 'The Lyrical Ballads' and certainly 'Intimations on Immortality ' and certainly 'Tintern Abbey' and certainly some of the great sonnets that constitute together one of the great poetic oeuvres.
Wordsworth combines the simple and sublime as no other poet does. His relation to Nature is deep and fresh, and yet too humble and moral, wild and beautiful. His direct experiential mode of meeting Nature in youth, is transformed into something far greater in his meditative and reflective relation to it . Wordsworth somehow brings to his meetings with nature a noble cast of mind. So too in his moral sentiment there is not a preaching narrowness, but a broad vision of something far more deeply interfused . Wordsworth in giving everyday life and perception a sense of the sublime is somehow a religious poet. The sense of something sublime that flows through all things is too a sense of something Divine.
Reading Wordsworth is receiving the sense that life too and our experience have a dimension of beauty and nobility which make them supremely worthwhile.
Reading Wordsworth one feels that one is lifted up to one's own better nature.
And this too when there are in him immortal lines, which like ' the best part of a good man's life is small acts of kindness and of love' are unforgettable.

This book is an excellent introduction to Wordsworth, a much-loved yet often-disparaged poet. As a fan of Romanticism, I adore Wordsworth and have dog-eared and battered this wonderful volume to death. Even cynics will be moved by Wordsworth's praise of the divine spirit that breathes in Nature and inspires men with her succoring benevolence. Don't miss the favorites "The Prelude" and "Titurn Abby" and the lesser-known "A Night-Piece," "Her Eyes are Wild," and "Nutting."

William Wordsworth was one of the best Romantic poets of the 19th century. This slim volume, a work that I purchased while still an undergraduate student, has been with me for many years, and I enjoy returning to it every so often, to recall the work of Wordsworth.

As the Introduction points out (Page ix): "One of the basic tenets of Wordsworth's philosophy is that the world and everything in it, man included, are good and that it is mankind's fundamental duty to enjoy 'the air that it breathes.'" The poet, in his view, has the responsibility of advancing that perspective among people. Put another way by the editor of this volume (Page x): "To be happy, man must become familiar with and adjust to the immutable laws of nature."

The volume itself features a number of Wordsworth's better known and more important works, such as "Preface to Lyrical Ballads," in which he speaks of his views of poetry (in prose). There follow poems, such as "Lucy Gray," "Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known," "She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways," "I Travelled among Unknown Men," "Great Men Have Been among Us," "To Toussaint L'Ouverture," "The World Is too Much with Us," "She Was a Phantom of Delight," and so on. In short, there is enough here to get a sense of the art of Wordsworth.

A couple brief examples (some of my favorites) of his work:

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

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 daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."

The World Is too Much with Us

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!"

The words in the latter are touching still, as humanity tries to deal with the problems facing the environment, oftentimes losing sight of the wonder of nature and how we are exploiting and degrading it.

At any rate, a nice introduction to the art of William Wordsworth.

Eilenberg's book opens the complex and fascinating topic of intellectual property, in addition to providing brilliant readings of the major poems of these two seminal Romantic poets.

The Prelude, divided into 14 books, was first published in 1850, a few months after Wordsworth's death. In 1926 a second version divided into 13 books was published. In this comprehensive two-volume edition in the Cornell Wordsworth series the photographs of the MSS are contained in the first volume and the transcriptions in the second. The reader is offered thousands of new substantive and accidental readings revealing with rare depth and precision WW's fascinating creative process spanning many years. A detailed history of the poem's growth from two books during 1798-1799 to 14 books during 1832-1850 is supplied by Reed in his introduction. Reed's patience and skill in editing this complex and daunting material deserves every praise. The physical aspect of the volumes is praiseworthy as well; unfortunately the MSS photographs are not always clear; but this does not in any way diminish the book's value.

Adam Kirsch writing in the 'New Yorker' reports that this biography does an outstanding job in covering the details of Wordsworth's everyday life. It contrasts with other biographies in giving equal focus to the long years after he had written his great works.
Kirsch finds the book's limitation is that it gives equal time and attention to a host of Wordsworth's activities while not focusing on his Poetry. For the Poetry is what makes Wordsworth important to us today, and not the long, and rather dull life story.
Wordsworth's radical youth, when it was bliss to be alive, and to be young was very heaven, his travels to France, his love- affair with Annette Vallon, the birth of his daughter all are in the background of the great decade of poetic work begun in the 1790's. Kirsch maintains that this great period of writing is one in which Wordsworth is still between worlds, torn by his disillusionment with the French Revolution. It is a time before he settles into being the Tory conservative, and eventually respected and admired poet laureate of England.
The greatness of Wordsworth which Kirsch sees in great part as connected with a kind of democratic religious vision in which he sees into , sympathizes with and portrays the kind of ordinary and not - so- ordinary souls outside the realm of previous English poetry comes to a climax in this period of uncertainty.
Wordsworth's special connection with Nature, the whole sublime and yet deeply passionate and calm tone of his greatest poetry provide a kind of consoling religious vision for many of his great and devoted readers. These include Emerson, and most especially John Stuart Mill .Mill's account in his 'Autobiography' of being saved from his terrible depression and loss of the sense of meaning of his own life, through his reading of Wordsworth is one telling example of how powerful the effect of Wordsworth's poetry.
This biography according to Kirsch gives detailed insight into all of Wordsworth's closest relations, including what is one of the most remarkable and productive literary friendships of all time, Wordsworth's close connection with Coleridge.
For all students of Wordsworth, for all those who would know his life in the most detailed way possible this work is indispensable.

Wordsword had a dream to become a great poet. He wants to be man, to be in contact with nature and human life.