This volume is an excellent introduction to Wordsworth's poetry. His great autobiographical poem The Prelude runs to thirteen books in the text of 1805. But by 1799 the poet had already written a version covering his childhood and adolescence in under a thousand lines. This complete, self-contained work includes most of the beautiful poetry that has made the longer Prelude famous. The text of this two-part Prelude has been in print since 1973 but has not until now been readily available. It is prefaced by two poems that form a natural introduction: The Pedlar, the poet's first...

.....wonderful powers of reading the text....students who want to get close to the poetry could still hardly do better'. Keith Hanley, Lancaster. '..newly published work by a major critic;...a necessary volume, one that should be in all university libraries.' Michael O'Neill, Durham. 'The Invisible World' contains ten chapters on important aspects of Romantic Poetry. There are detailed assessments of the poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats with references to Shelley and Byron. Central 'Romantic' questions are addressed such as: What did Romanticism consist of? What was the...