Book Description

Excerpt from The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth Literature is pure spirit, and hence its truths must be spiritually discerned, yet there are two avenues of approach which are likely to prove the most alluring and satisfactory to the student, the chronological and that of correlation. Where the mind and art of a poet have developed naturally from the simple to the complex, the chronological order seems the most helpful and appropriate; but when we find midway in a poet's career work which is both history and prophecy, -work which reveals the method and spirit of the past and contains the potency of the future, it may well serve as a point around which other poems are to be gathered, and the method of correlation will be found most suggestive. It follows that the method of annotation in each of these cases should be dif ferent. In the chronological, the eye is upon the past, and the principle hitherto evolved by the poet is made use of in the treatment of each successive poem; while in the method of correlation the eye looks before and after in a study of those elements which may be considered as fundamental in the life and art of the poet. I have illustrated the one method in my selections from Milton, Burns, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and the other in The Princess and Childe Harold. It has been said that as respects a man whom we never saw we are fortunate if we have, as means of knowing him, works revealing the various moods of his mind and emo tions of his heart, portraits painted by great artists in a lucky hour of his youth and age, and friends who had the insight to know and were both able and willing to tell us the truth in regard to his character. In the case of Wordsworth we have all of these and there is no excuse for taking half views of him and his work. The distinctive features of this edition are the latest text adopted by the poet; the chronological order of the poems; the date of composition and that of publica tion of each poem; the Essays and Prefaces on Poetry written between 1800 and 1845; a body of notes which Wordsworth printed in his various editions; notes at the head of each poem, dictated by the poet himself late in life to Miss Fenwick, and known as the I. F. Notes; notes revealing the time, place, occasion, and circumstance, so far as can be ascertained, out of which each poem had its origin bibliography of Wordsworth's works; a list of biographical and critical reviews. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.