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Collected Poems of William Wordsworth : Volume 14

By Wordsworth, William

Book Id: WPLBN0003972004
Format Type: PDF (eBook)
File Size: 4.55 MB.
Reproduction Date: 9/2/2015

Title:	Collected Poems of William Wordsworth : Volume 14
Author:	Wordsworth, William
Volume:	Volume 14
Language:	English
Subject:	Non Fiction, Romantic, Poetry
Collections:	Poetry, Authors Community, Naval Science
Historic Publication Date:	2015
Publisher:	William Ralph Press

Member Page:	Neil Azevedo
Citation APA MLA Chicago Wordsworth, W. (2015). Collected Poems of William Wordsworth : Volume 14. Retrieved from http://www.self.gutenberg.org/

Description
The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth collects the entirety of Wordsworth's verse, presenting it more or less chronologically and, as carefully as possible, the way was intended to be heard by the author, complete with the variety of word emphases that have been either represented by scare quotes or italics.

Summary
William Wordsworth, 1770 – 1850, was an English poet most commonly associated with being, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the early figures of British romanticism. Their publication of the volume Lyrical Ballads in 1798 often serves as a marker of sorts for when that movement publicly began. As a young artist—already showing signs of being a gifted writer and thinker at St. John’s College, Cambridge—Wordsworth completed an eye-opening, life-altering tour of France after which he became filled with the seeds of a zeitgeist that would lead to his influential ideas about verse altering its future forever. His poetry resonated with a new, tempered earnestness that he shaped and sculpted with his unprecedented notion that poetry should sound like everyday speech and embody more common “natural” themes, which distinguished his work markedly from all that preceded it, but also brought a great deal of negative criticism from the literary establishment of the day. As he matured, he relaxed into the more conservative aspects of the philosophies that informed his ideals and wrote bucolically yet keenly about nature and the human condition. Later in life his contribution to English letters was recognized and accepted and he was vested with the poet laureateship of England. His lifelong sympathy for humanity and nature allowed him to create and sustain a prosodic style based on an idiomatic plainness that survives in almost all English-language poetry today, and, in some ways regarding these elements, his influence on the canon is unparalleled. This electronic volume collects the entirety of his verse, presenting it more or less chronologically and, as carefully as possible, as this editor believes it was intended to be heard by the author, complete with the variety of word emphases that have been either represented by scare quotes or italics.

Excerpt
“The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”