Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth (Modern Library). This item is unavailable.Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth (Modern Library)

The most inclusive single-volume cloth edition of his poetry available, Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth, edited by literary critic and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mark Van Doren, with a new Introduction by leading Romanticist David Bromwich, 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.

"[Wordsworth] is loved, Bromwich writes in his Introduction, for a sense of radical sufficiency in the fact that life is the faith of many people who espouse a religion without a name. Wordsworth writes of a human nature that is not to be judged by the utility of some goods over others, the propriety of some behaviors, or the reasonableness of getting and spending as the market teaches getting and spending.

The life his poetry describes cannot be reduced to a series of preferable and less preferable options. We learn its deeper claim in the presence of suffering and joy, in suffering not less than in joy.

William Wordsworth (1770-18 50) was one of the greatest English Romantic poets; among his most significant poems are The Prelude, "Tintern Abbey," and "Intimations of Immortality."

Mark Van Doren (1894-1973) was a poet, literary critic, and renowned professor of English at Columbia University from 1920 to 1959. His Collected Poems, 1922-1938, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.

David Bromwich is a professor of English at Yale University and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s (1998).