In this second edition of William Wordsworth: A Life, Stephen Gill draws on knowledge of the poet's creative practices and his reputation and influence in his life-time and beyond. Refusing to treat the poet's later years as of little interest, this biography presents a narrative of the whole of Wordsworth's long life—1770 to 1850—tracing the development from the adventurous youth who alone of the great Romantic poets saw life in revolutionary France to the old man who became Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate. The various phases of Wordsworth's life are explored with a not uncritical sympathy; the narrative brings out the courage he and his wife and family were called upon to show as they crafted the life they wanted to lead. While the emphasis is on Wordsworth the writer, the personal relationships that nourished his creativity are fully treated, as are the historical circumstances that affected the production of his poetry. Wordsworth, it is widely believed, valued poetic spontaneity. He did, but he also took pains over every detail of the process of publication. The foundation of this second edition of the biography remains, as it was of the first, a conviction that Wordsworth's poetry, which has given pleasure and comfort to generations of readers in the past, will continue to do so in the years to come.

On the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth comes a highly imaginative and vivid portrait of a revolutionary poet who embodied the spirit of his age Published in time for the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth’s birth, this is the biography of a great poetic genius, a revolutionary who changed the world. Wordsworth rejoiced in the French Revolution and played a central role in the cultural upheaval that we call the Romantic Revolution. He and his fellow Romantics changed forever the way we think about childhood, the sense of the self, our connection to the natural environment, and the purpose of poetry. But his was also a revolutionary life in the old sense of the word, insofar as his art was of memory, the return of the past, the circling back to childhood and youth. This beautifully written biography is purposefully fragmentary, momentary, and selective, opening up what Wordsworth called "the hiding-places of my power."

Haunting’s consequences for the literary imagination. Reading is a weirdly phantasmic trade: animating words to revive absent voices, rehearing the past, fantasizing a future. In Romantic Shades and Shadows, Susan J. Wolfson explores spectral language, formations, and sensations, defining an apparitional poetics in the finely grained textures of writing and their effects on present reading. Framed by an introductory chapter on writing and apparition and an afterword on haunted reading, the book includes chapters of sustained, revelatory close attention to the particular, often peculiar, literary imaginations of William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, W. B. Yeats, and John Keats. Wolfson also explores the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (a self-confessed Ghost-Theorist), Mary Shelley, and other writers of the Long Romantic era, canonical as well as less familiar. All are encountered in freshly pointed ways on an arc of investigation that builds with generative force. Romantic Shades and Shadows is written with a lucidity, wit, and accessibility that will appeal to general readers, and with a critical sophistication and scholarly expertise that will engage advanced students, critics, and professional peers.

William and Dorothy Wordsworth is the first literary biography of the Wordsworths' creative collaboration. Using poems, letters, journals, memoirs, and biographies, it plots the intertwined lives of the Wordsworth siblings and their writing.

Brimming with poetry, art, and nature writing—Wordsworth and Coleridge as you've never seen them before June 1797 to September 1798 is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Kubla Khan,” as well as his unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, and William Wordsworth’s revolutionary songs in Lyrical Ballads along with “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth's paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. In The Making of Poetry, Adam Nicolson embeds himself in the reality of this unique moment, exploring the idea that these poems came from this particular place and time, and that only by experiencing the physical circumstances of the year, in all weathers and all seasons, at night and at dawn, in sunlit reverie and moonlit walks, can the genesis of the poetry start to be understood. The poetry Wordsworth and Coleridge made was not from settled conclusions but from the adventure on which they embarked, thinking of poetry as a challenge to all received ideas, stripping away the dead matter, looking to shed consciousness and so change the world. What emerges is a portrait of these great figures seen not as literary monuments but as young men, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but still in urgent search of the paths toward it. The artist Tom Hammick accompanied Nicolson for much of the year, making woodcuts from the fallen timber in the park at Alfoxden where the Wordsworths lived. Interspersed throughout the book, his images bridge the centuries, depicting lives at the source of our modern sensibility: a psychic landscape of doubt and possibility, full of beauty and thick with desire for a kind of connectedness that seems permanently at hand and yet always out of reach.

First published in 1974. Wordsworth, with Coleridge, is the major literary critic of the Romantic period. This volume assembles all of Wordsworth’s formal critical writings and a selection of critical comments from his correspondence. These documents are invaluable for Romantic poetry at large, and his theories — particularly on poetic diction, ordinary language and the nature of the creative process — inspired lively critical debate. This book discusses the nature and origin of Wordsworth’s criticism in general, and the literary tradition from which they sprang. The texts are succinctly annotated and there is a select bibliography. This book will be of interest to students of literature.

Written by his collateral descendant, the sculptor Andrew Wordsworth, this insightful biography weaves life and poetry together to create an utterly revelatory account of the man who was arguably the greatest Romantic poet of them all. Radical in his youth, and father to a love-child in revolutiontorn France, Wordsworth later retreated into reaction and nationalism. His early writings transformed English poetry, but the greatest achievement was his epic The Prelude, which he squirreled away and which was not published until after his death. After 1805 he outwardly produced little that was of note, and his project with Coleridge, The Recluse, remained a literary pipe-dream, or perhaps a smoke-screen. He himself became something of a recluse, increasingly isolated in his bucolic corner of the Lake District, surrounded only by his close family circle (the harem, as Coleridge called it): his sister Dorothy, and later his wife Mary and his daughters. Wordsworth's complex and aloof personality has always been an enigma, but by combining close readings of the poems with a detailed examination of his life, Andrew Wordsworth is able to unlock the secrets of one of the most fascinating and influential writers in English. As Dr David Whitley notes, Well-Kept Secrets intersperses the narrative exploring Wordsworth's life with a wealth of verse. This structure clearly shows how Wordsworth's art was intimately linked to his existence and how it was a means - more or less conscious - to come to terms with the world, himself and the many contradictions running like chasms across his personality. It also enables Andrew Wordsworth to shed some new light on the interpretation of the poetry, to better understand the poet as a man.

The most accessible edition of Wordsworth's poetry and prose, prepared to meet the needs of both students and scholars. This Norton Critical Edition presents a generous selection of William Wordworth's poetry (including the thirteen-book Prelude of 1805) and prose works along with supporting materials for in-depth study. Together, the Norton Critical Editions of Wordsworth's Poetry and Prose and The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850 are the essential texts for studying this author. Wordsworth's Poetry and Prose includes a large selection of texts chronologically arranged, thereby allowing readers to trace the author's evolving interests and ideas. An insightful general introduction and textual introduction precede the texts, each of which is fully annotated. Illustrative materials include maps, manuscript pages, and title pages. "Criticism" collects thirty responses to Wordsworth?s poetry and prose spanning three centuries by British and American authors. Contributors include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Felicia Hemans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lucy Newlyn, Stephen Gill, Neil Fraistat, Mary Jacobus, Nicholas Roe, M. H. Abrams, Anne K. Mellor, Michael O?Neill, and Geoffrey Hartman, among others. The volume also includes a Chronology, a Biographical Register, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles and First Lines of Poems.

"The Romantic period in literature coincided with two of the most significant transformations in modern history: the Industrial Revolution and, with it, the inflection point of the Anthropocene. Literary critics have shown that much of Romantic poetry expresses an uncanny insight into both of these transformations, including the human and ecological costs of what we now call a carbon-based economy. But was art really capable of making sense of the emerging crisis-or of changing the future? In a superbly nuanced work of literary criticism, Anahid Nersessian shows that poets began to disqualify themselves from explaining the train of consequences that industry set in motion. Their form of knowledge-if knowledge it be-was of an order different from science or economics, and could not bear the burden of accounting for environmental calamity. Romanticism, Nersessian argues, is of the Anthropocene but not about it, and she cautions against investing its poetry with a straightforwardly testimonial power. In doing so, she models an approach to criticism that reads within what Charles Olson calls "the shapeful," emphasizing the role of rhetorical figures in fashioning the posture a poem takes on a historical question. While focusing on the Romantics, Nersessian also ranges back to the seventeenth century (e.g., the poetry of Andrew Marvell) and forward to examples of contemporary poetry and conceptual art (e.g., Derek Jarman's poetry, and installations by Agnes Denes and Helen Mirra). Within literary studies, this is a widely anticipated book by one of the most brilliant critics of her generation"--