Essential Wordsworth

by William Wordsworth

Book Overview

From the introduction by Seamus Heaney: Wordsworth's power over us stems from the manifest strength of his efforts to integrate several strenuous and potentially contradictory efforts. Indeed, it is not until Yeats that we encounter another poet in whom emotional susceptibility, intellectual force, psychological acuteness, political awareness, artistic self-knowledge and bardic representativeness are so truly and responsibly combined. He is an indispensable...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006088861X
• ISBN13: 9780060888619
• Release Date: February 2006
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 4.5" x 7.2"

Customer Reviews

The Best Poems of "an idle dreamer"

Seamus Heaney is a good editor if nothing else (I'm not particularly fond of his poetry, despite his Nobel.). But, as Wordsworth says in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads included herein, "I have one request to make of my Reader, which is, that in judging these poems he would decide from his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgment of others."-Here are all the finest poems of the first and (finest some say, though I prefer Shelley) out-and-out English Romantic Poet. There's no need to go in search of massive tomes surveying his poetry and his life (unless you are one of those unfortunate creatures known as a graduate student). All the poems that justly made him famous are right here. Recommended to all for whom, "...the meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."