Major Works of William Wordsworth

It's popular to dismiss Wordsworth's poetry because his later work is inferior to his early output. The charge is serious and legitimate in many ways (his poems lessened greatly in quality halfway through his career), but it's absurd to deny that works like The Ruined Cottage, 'I wandered lonely as a cloud,' and London, 1802 are among the best poems in English.

This collection represents his entire oeuvre—the worst and best. The Prelude is present (a long autobiographical poem unpublished in Wordsworth's lifetime), most of his contributions to Lyrical Ballads, prefaces, essays, letters, and many representative poems from each stage of the author's development. There are notable omissions (particularlyThe World is Too Much with Us), but there's more than enough to give a sense of the prolific writer's rise and fall as an artist.

Wordsworth is generally credited with his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge with the inauguration of the Romantic movement in poetry upon the publication of their Lyrical Ballads. Coleridge was Wordsworth's master, demonstrated by his continued maturation as a poet throughout his life, but it was Wordsworth who contributed some of the best embodiments of Romantic ideals, manifested in his preoccupations with nature, emotion recollected, nostalgia, and especially his praise of the sublime.

The editor of this volume includes annotations and other tools to provide an understanding of Wordsworth's life and character, but these are poems to be read and enjoyed. Wordsworth and the other English Romantics celebrated the aesthetic experience, they appreciated the poem itself, and they crafted poems as art rather than didactic discourse. Knowing this, we can read Wordsworth's musicality and beauty for what they are, and allow him some grace if his later works were less than they might have been.

Review by C. Hollis Crossman
C. Hollis Crossman used to be a child. Now he's a husband and father who loves church, good food, and weird stuff. He might be a mythical creature, but he's definitely not a centaur. Read more of his reviews here.

Review by C. Hollis Crossman
C. Hollis Crossman used to be a child. Now he's a husband and father who loves church, good food, and weird stuff. He might be a mythical creature, but he's definitely not a centaur. Read more of his reviews here.