Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems - Softcover

Wordsworth And Coleridge

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1514351447 ISBN 13: 9781514351444

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015

Synopsis

Lyrical Ballads With Other Poems, 1800, Volume 1is a classic collection of English poetry by William Wordsworth. William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland,[3] part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was captain, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.[4]Wordsworth's father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. He was frequently away from home on business, so the young William and his siblings had little involvement with him and remained distant from him until his death in 1783.[5] However, he did encourage William in his reading, and in particular set him to commit to memory large portions of verse, including works by Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. William was also allowed to use his father's library. William also spent time at his mother's parents' house in Penrith, Cumberland, where he was exposed to the moors, but did not get along with his grandparents or his uncle, who also lived there. His hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide.[6]Wordsworth was taught to read by his mother and attended, first, a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth, then a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families, where he was taught by Ann Birkett, who insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school in Penrith that he met the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who later became his wife.[7]After the death of his mother, in 1778, Wordsworth's father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire (now in Cumbria) and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She and William did not meet again for another nine years.Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College, Cambridge. He received his BA degree in 1791.[8] He returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at Cambridge, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.

About this title

About the Author:

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth in the Lake District of England, and was educated at the University of Cambridge. As a young man he was fired with enthusiasm for the French Revolution, but the year he spent in France after graduating left him disillusioned with radical politics. He turned more seriously to literature and, in collaboration with his friend Samuel Coleridge, produced Lyrical Ballads (1798). His return to the Lake District in 1799 marked the beginning of his most productive period as a poet, during which he wrote his most famous long poem, The Prelude (1805).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was an English poet, philosopher, and literary critic. Born in Ottery St Mary, Coleridge was educated at Christ’s Hospital School, London, where he began his friendship with Charles Lamb and began writing his first sonnets, and Jesus College, Cambridge. With his friend William Wordsworth, Coleridge founded the romantic movement and became a member of the Lake Poets. In 1798 they cowrote Lyrical Ballads, a landmark collection of poems that marked the beginning of romanticism in English literature. The collection includes his greatest poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Michael Schmidt is the author of The Novel: A Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, Lives of the Poets. Schmidt studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. In 1969, he founded Carcanet Press Limited, where he is currently the editorial and managing director. He is also a founder and general editor of PN Review. Schmidt was Professor of Poetry at Glasgow University, visiting professor at Bolton University, and Writer in Residence at St John's College, Cambridge. Schmidt writes poetry, fiction, and literary history, and is also a translator and anthologist. He was born in Mexico in 1947 and currently lives in the UK.

Review:

'All who teach English literature of the period will have felt the need of a volume such as this, which will retain its authority for a long time to come.' - The Year's Work in English Studies

'It is an edition of a formative work which all students and lovers of English poetry will warmly welcome.' - Times Education Supplement

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1514351447
• ISBN 13: 9781514351444
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 174