Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth (Modern Library Classics)

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 affections and duties.”

Mark Van Doren (1894–1973) was an American Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and critic who taught English at Columbia University for nearly thirty years.

David Bromwich is a professor of English at Yale Univer-sity and the author of numerous books, including Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth’s Poetry of the 1790s.