William Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth in the Lake District and educated at 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 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).Stephen Gill a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He holds degrees from Oxford and Edinburgh Universities and is a long-serving member of the Wordsworth Trust. He has written William Wordsworth: A Life (1989) and Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998).

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• William Wordsworth: Selected PoemsChronologyIntroductionFurther ReadingA Note on the TextsSelected PoemsOld Man TravellingThe Ruined CottageA Night-PieceThe Old Cumberland BeggarLines Written at a Small Distance from my HouseGoody Blake and Harry GillThe ThornThe Idiot BoyLines Written in Early SpringAnecdote for FathersWe Are SevenExpostulation and ReplyThe Tables TurnedLines Written a Few Miles above Tintern AbbeyThe FountainThe Two April Mornings'A slumber did my spirit seal'Song ('She dwelt among th' untrodden ways')'Strange fits of passion I have known'Lucy GrayNutting'Three years she grew in sun and shower'The BrothersHart-Leap Wellfrom Home at Grasmerefrom Poems on the Naming of PlacesTo Joanna'A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags'Michael'I travelled among unknown Men'To a Sky-LarkAlice FellBeggarsTo a Butterfly ('Stay near me')To the Cuckoo'My heart leaps up when i behold'To H. C., Six Years Old'Among all lovely things my Love had been'To a Butterfly ('I've watched you')Resolution and Independence'Within our happy Castle there dwelt one''The world is too much with us''With Ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh''Dear Native Brooks your ways have i pursued''Great Men have been among us''It is not to be thought of that the Flood''When I have borne in memory what has tamed''England! the time is come when thou shouldst wean'Composed by the Seas-Side, near Calais'It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free'To Toussaint L'OuvertureComposed in the Valley, near Dover, on the Day of LandingComposed Upon Westminster BridgeLondon, 1802'Nuns fret not at their Convent's narrow room'Yarrow Unvisited'She was a Phantom of delight'Ode to DutyOde: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood'I wandered lonely as a Cloud'Stepping WestwardThe Solitary ReaperElegiac StanzasA ComplaintGipsiesSt. Paul's'Surprised by joy—impatient asthe Wind'Yew-TreesComposed at Cora LinnYarrow VisitedTo R. B. Haydon, Esq. ('High is our calling, Friend!')Sequel to the Foregoing (Beggars)Ode: Composed upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendor and BeautyThe River Duddon: Conclusion'The unremitting voice of nightly streams'Airey-Force ValleyExtempore Effusion Upon the Death of James Hogg'Glad sight wherever new with old'At Furness Abbey'I know an aged Man constrained to dwell'from The PreludeBook IBook IIBook IIIBook IVBook VBook VIBook VIIBook VIIIBook IXBook XBook XIBook XIIBook XIIINotesIndex of TitlesIndex of First Lines