Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the course of English literature and poetry.

The Prelude, Wordsworth's great autobiographical poem, is crucial to our understanding of his life and poetry. Written between 1798 and 1805, the text was intensively revised in Wordsworth's later years. This volume contains the original version of 1805, which was read to Coleridge. The poem was first published in 1850, after the poet's death, and is available in Wordsworth's Poetical Works. To facilitate comparison, line numbers of the 1850 text have been placed in square brackets on the right-hand side of the page.

Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth represents Wordsworth's prolific output, from the poems first published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798 that changed the face of English poetry to the late "Yarrow Revisited." Wordsworth's poetry is celebrated for its deep feeling, its use of ordinary speech, the love of nature it expresses, and its representation of commonplace things and events. As Matthew Arnold notes, " Wordsworth's poetry] is great because of the extraordinary power with which he] feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple elementary...

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,...

Featuring an extended introduction by scholar of British Romanticism, Alan Vardy, Fragments consists of Wordsworth's philosophico-aesthetic prose fragment "The Sublime & the Beautiful" and "Hawkshead & the Ferry." While a fragmented text, unfinished, almost certainly abandoned by the author, the difficulties of the former text no longer appear fatal so much as evidence of Wordsworth's rigorous struggle to come to terms not only with his own aesthetic experiences, but with the philosophical aesthetics of his epoch. What were once read as confusions may now be seen as productive of complex...