William Wordsworth: Selected Poems

This major new selection, like that made by Matthew Arnold in 1879, concentrates on Wordsworth's very greatest poetry.  It contains a generous selection of the shorter poems, including Wordsworth's whole contribution to the Lyrical Ballads (1798), several tales from The Excursion and over half of The Prelude.  Two additional features of this edition are new versions of The Pedlar and The Ruined Cottage and selections from the fourteen-book Prelude, both new in the sense that neither has been presented before in a readable text.

Professor Hayden presents the poetry in freshly edited texts and his notes to each poem incorporate summaries of significant criticism.  Appendices contain Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802) and the Preface to Poems (1815), with Essay, Supplementary.