The Prelude and Other Poems

Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind mans eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns in cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart William Wordsworths verse was the embodiment of the Romantic age, with its evocation of a unifying spirit running through all things. This collection brings together a rich and diverse selection of his works, from the epic autobiographical masterpiece The Prelude to much-loved shorter poems such as I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and She Was a Phantom of Delight. Alongside his more personal and introspective compositions, poems such as Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways and The Idiot Boy demonstrate, in an era of political and social ferment, the manner in which Wordsworth, together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, forged a revolutionary new poetic style through the publication of Lyrical Ballads one that embraced the vernacular and subjects previously deemed unworthy of poetry and thus changed the literary landscape of England for ever.