Wordsworth's Political Writings

This annotated text of the four main political works produced by William Wordsworth enables readers to follow the political peregrinations of a major poet who, as he said to Orville Dewey, an American visitor, gave twelve hours thought to social questions for each hour he devoted to poetry. It includes the Jacobin A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793), infused with the doctrines of Tom Paine; the liberal republican 'prose poem' The Convention of Cintra (1809), the Tory apologetics of Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland (1818), and the welfare-state philosophy of the 1835 Postscript in which Wordsworth married the Coleridgean concept of a society leavened by its 'clerisy' to a devastating critique of laissez-faire 'political economy'.