The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth deploys its forty-seven original essays to present a stimulating account of Wordsworth's life and achievement and to map new directions in criticism. In addition to twenty-two essays wholly on Wordsworth's poetry, other essays return to the poetry while exploring other dimensions of the life and work of the major Romantic poet. The result is a dialogic exploration of many major texts and problems in Wordsworth scholarship. This uniquely comprehensive handbook is structured so as to present, in turn, Wordsworth's life, career, and networks; aspects of the major lyrical and narrative poetry; components of 'The Recluse'; his poetical inheritance and his transformation of poetics; the variety of intellectual influences upon his work, from classical republican thought to modern science; his shaping of modern culture in such fields as gender, landscape, psychology, ethics, politics, religion, and ecology; and his 19th- and 20th-century reception-most importantly by poets, but also in modern criticism and scholarship.

Examination of the links between science and literary history is providing new insight for scholars across a range of disciplines. In Wordsworth and the Geologists, first published in 1995, John Wyatt explores the relationship between a major Romantic poet and a group of scientists in the formative years of a new discipline, geology. Wordsworth's later poems and prose display unexpected knowledge of contemporary geology and a preoccupation with many of the philosophical issues concerned with the developing science of geology. Letters and diaries of a group of leading geologists reveal that they knew Wordsworth, and discussed their subject with him. Wyatt shows how the implications of such discussions challenge the simplistic version of 'two cultures', the Romantic-literary against the scientific-materialistic; and he reminds us of the variety of interrelating discourses current between 1807 (the year of the foundation of the Geological Society of London) and 1850 (the year of Wordsworth's death).

William Wordsworth, Second-Generation Romantic provides a truly comprehensive reading of 'late' Wordsworth and the full arc of his career from (1814–1840) revealing that his major poems after Waterloo contest poetic and political issues with his younger contemporaries: Keats, Shelley and Byron. Refuting conventional models of influence, where Wordsworth 'fathers' the younger poets, Cox demonstrates how Wordsworth's later writing evolved in response to 'second generation' romanticism. After exploring the ways in which his younger contemporaries rewrote his 'Excursion', this volume examines how Wordsworth's 'Thanksgiving Ode' enters into a complex conversation with Leigh Hunt and Byron; how the delayed publication of 'Peter Bell' could be read as a reaction to the Byronic hero; how the older poet's River Duddon sonnets respond to Shelley's 'Mont Blanc'; and how his later volumes, particularly 'Memorials of a Tour in Italy, 1837', engage in a complicated erasure of poets who both followed and predeceased him.

First published in 1972, this set of 9 volumes contains all contemporary British periodical reviews of the first (or other significantly early) editions from 1793 and 1824 of works by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats. In addition, a few later reviews are supplied, as well as a substantial number of reviews of other contemporary figures, including William Godwin, Robert Southey, Samuel Rogers, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Introductions to each periodical provide brief sketches of each publication as well as names, dates and bibliographical information. Headnotes offer bibliographical data of the reviews and suggested approaches to studying them. The index serves to locate authors and titles reviewed, reviewers, sources of quotations, other people and works mentioned and other proper nouns of interest. This comprehensive set will be of interest to those studying the Romantics and English literature.

The keynote lectures in this collection are those by Dame Gillian Beer on Darwin and Romanticism, Richard Cronin on Wordsworth and the Periodical Press, Paul H. Fry on Wordsworth, Coleridge and the topos of Labour, Claire Lamont on the Romantic Cottage, and Nicholas Roe on Keats and the Elgin marbles (with five illustrations). In the conference papers, Jamie Baxendine writes on Intimations, James Castell on Peter Bell, Lexi Drayton on the Gypsy figure in Tintern Abbey and associated poems and painting, Mark Sandy on 'the circulation of grief', Chris Simons on Wordsworth and his patrons, Emily Stanback on medical taxonomy, Heidi Thomson on Sara Coleridge's editing of Biographia Literaria, and Saeko Yoshikawa on Sara Hutchinson (the younger)'s Journals of 1850.

In this modest volume the author reflects on the Sequence of Sonnets concerning the River Duddon which William Wordsworth published in April 1820. In the same volume Wordsworth included his poem "Vaudracour and Julia" and his prose travel guide "A Topographical Description of the Country of the Lakes." Although William Wordsworth had now reached his 50th year, this publication was his first real commercial success as a poet. The 'Duddon' Sonnets are somewhat neglected today and his modern popularity rests largely with the "Lyrical Ballads" - partly a collaboration with Coleridge - and his autobiographical poem "The Prelude." The sequence provides an enchanting description of the River and its environs as it falls from its source among the Central Fells of Cumbria to the Irish Sea, as well as providing a master-class in the art of the Sonneteer.