selected poems · wordsworth

William Wordsworth remade English poetry with Lyrical Ballads in 1798, insisting on the language of ordinary people and the dignity of humble lives. These poems, from Tintern Abbey to the Intimations Ode, set out his great subjects: nature as moral teacher, childhood as the source of vision, memory, loss, and the mind's power to half-create what it perceives.

William Wordsworth, Selected Poems, edited by Stephen Gill (Penguin Books, 2004). Read in Junior Spring at Torrey Honors: The Ruined Cottage; The Old Cumberland Beggar; Lines Written in Early Spring; We Are Seven; Expostulation and Reply; The Tables Turned; Lines written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey; A slumber did my spirit seal; Song (She dwelt among th' untrodden ways); Strange fits of passion I have known; Lucy Gray; Three years she grew in sun and shower; I travelled among unknown Men; To a Sky-Lark; My heart leaps up when I behold; Resolution and Independence; The world is too much with us; It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free; Composed Upon Westminster Bridge; London, 1802; She was a Phantom of delight; Ode to Duty; Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood; I wandered lonely as a cloud; The Solitary Reaper; Elegiac Stanzas; Ode: Composed Upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and Beauty.