A Choice Of Wordsworths Verse

The theology and the poetry of Welch poet R.S. Thomas.

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.

Popular anthologies hold that the Romantic Era in Great Britain ended promptly in 1832 and that the early Twentieth Century was the time of Modernism and the rejection of the Romantic in British letters. However, in Wales, just the opposite was true. This study traces the work of poets and novelists in Wales in the early- to mid-Twentieth Century who all found their poetic master to be William Wordsworth. In the early part of the century, W. H. Davies, John Cowper Powys and Huw Menai – a tramp, a mystic novelist and a coal miner – produce novels and poetry with Wordsworth as their acknowledged master. By mid-century, Idris Davies, a coal miner turned teacher, R. S. Thomas, an Anglican priest, and Leslie Norris, another teacher, are writing in the “mountainous shadow of William Wordsworth.” While the literary lights of London are leading the Modernist revolution, in Wales, the inspiration is still the English poet, Wordsworth. This study will illuminate this flare up of Romanticism, and show the way in which Romanticism re-emerges from unexpected quarters.

Whether wandering the hills or whiling away an hour waiting for a train, no reader can fail to be touched by the lyrical, evocative beauty of William Wordsworth's verse contained in this anthology.

Murderers, crazed widows, beggars, betrayed women—such are the pitiful figures who appear throughout Wordsworth's early narrative poetry. Analyzing the poet's use of pathos from the two volumes of Lyrical Ballads through the completion of The Prelude, James H. Averill argues that, for Wordsworth, the poetry of human life is inevitably the poetry of anguish and loss. Averill examines the relation of the poet to his human subjects, exploring the questions of tragic response and sentimental morality, the literary uses of human misery, and the pleasures of tragedy. In Wordsworth and the Poetry of Human Suffering, James H. Averill enriches our understanding and our appreciation of the peculiar power of Wordsworth's poetic vision.