Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth (Modern Library)
- Book Review,
by WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, et al
Review
"The poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time."
--Matthew Arnold
"Wordsworth stands for a distinctly human naturalness; one, that is, consummating a discipline, moral and other. A poet who can bring home to us the possibility of such a naturalness should today be found important. In Wordsworth, the possibility is offered us realized; realized in a mode central and compelling enough to enforce the bearing of poetry upon life, the significance of poetry for actual living."
--F. R. Leavis
Review
"The poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time."
--Matthew Arnold
"Wordsworth stands for a distinctly human naturalness; one, that is, consummating a discipline, moral and other. A poet who can bring home to us the possibility of such a naturalness should today be found important. In Wordsworth, the possibility is offered us realized; realized in a mode central and compelling enough to enforce the bearing of poetry upon life, the significance of poetry for actual living."
--F. R. Leavis
Book Description
The most inclusive single-volume cloth edition of his poetry available, Selected Poetry - edited by literary critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren - represents Wordsworth's prolific output, from the poems first published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798 that changed the face of English poetry to the late "Yarrow Revisited." Wordsworth's poetry is celebrated for its deep feeling, its use of ordinary speech, the love of nature it expresses, and its presentation of commonplace things and events.
From the Inside Flap
The most inclusive single-volume cloth edition of his poetry available, Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth, edited by literary critic and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mark Van Doren, with a new Introduction by leading Romanticist David Bromwich, represents Wordsworth's prolific output, from the poems first published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798 that changed the face of English poetry to the late "Yarrow Revisited." Wordsworth's poetry is celebrated for its deep feeling, its use of ordinary speech, the love of nature it expresses, and its representation of commonplace things and events.
"[Wordsworth] is loved, Bromwich writes in his Introduction, for a sense of radical sufficiency in the fact that life is the faith of many people who espouse a religion without a name. Wordsworth writes of a human nature that is not to be judged by the utility of some goods over others, the propriety of some behaviors, or the reasonableness of getting and spending as the market teaches getting and spending.
The life his poetry describes cannot be reduced to a series of preferable and less preferable options. We learn its deeper claim in the presence of suffering and joy, in suffering not less than in joy.
From the Back Cover
"The poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time."
About the Author
William Wordsworth (1770-18 50) was one of the greatest English Romantic poets; among his most significant poems are The Prelude, "Tintern Abbey," and "Intimations of Immortality."
Mark Van Doren (1894-1973) was a poet, literary critic, and renowned professor of English at Columbia University from 1920 to 1959. His Collected Poems, 1922-1938, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.
David Bromwich is a professor of English at Yale University and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s (1998).
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
An Evening Walk
addressed to a young lady
Far from my dearest Friend, 'tis mine to rove
Through bare grey dell, high wood, and pastoral cove;
Where Derwent rests, and listens to the roar
That stuns the tremulous cliffs of high Lodore;
Where peace to Grasmere's lonely island leads,
To willowy hedge-rows, and to emerald meads;
Leads to her bridge, rude church, and cottaged grounds,
Her rocky sheepwalks, and her woodland bounds;
Where, undisturbed by winds, Winander sleeps
'Mid clustering isles, and holly-sprinkled steeps;
Where twilight glens endear my Esthwaite's shore,
And memory of departed pleasures, more.
Fair scenes, erewhile, I taught, a happy child,
The echoes of your rocks my carols wild:
The spirit sought not then, in cherished sadness,
A cloudy substitute for failing gladness.
In youth's keen eye the livelong day was bright,
The sun at morning, and the stars at night,
Alike, when first the bittern's hollow bill
Was heard, or woodcocks roamed the moonlight hill.
In thoughtless gaiety I coursed the plain,
And hope itself was all I knew of pain;
For then, the inexperienced heart would beat
At times, while young Content forsook her seat,
And wild Impatience, pointing upward, showed,
Through passes yet unreached, a brighter road,
Alas! the idle tale of man is found
Depicted in the dial's moral round;
Hope with reflection blends her social rays
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