First published in 1974. Wordsworth, with Coleridge, is the major literary critic of the Romantic period. This volume assembles all of Wordsworth's formal critical writings and a selection of critical comments from his correspondence. These documents are invaluable for Romantic poetry at large, and his theories - particularly on poetic diction, ordinary language and the nature of the creative process - inspired lively critical debate. This book discusses the nature and origin of Wordsworth's criticism in general, and the literary tradition from which they sprang. The texts are succinctly annotated and there is a select bibliography. This book will be of interest to students of literature.

First published in 1974. Wordsworth, with Coleridge, is the major literary critic of the Romantic period. This volume assembles all of Wordsworth's formal critical writings and a selection of critical comments from his correspondence. These documents are invaluable for Romantic poetry at large, and his theories - particularly on poetic diction, ordinary language and the nature of the creative process - inspired lively critical debate. This book discusses the nature and origin of Wordsworth's criticism in general, and the literary tradition from which they sprang. The texts are succinctly annotated and there is a select bibliography. This book will be of interest to students of literature.

Volume 1 of The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, as edited by W J B Owen and Jane W Smyser. This is a print version of the new, searchable, navigable, electronic edition of this standard work. Compared with the original Clarendon edition, this one has two advantages: textual notes are more clearly separated and are columnized; and the existence of editorial commentary is indicated by marginal symbols in the text (in the ebook, of course, these symbols are hyperlinked to the commentary). While colour is used in the preview, as in the ebook, the print in the paperback is black and white. The Contents include Wordsworth's famous poetical manifesto, the 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads', his Jacobinical defence of political terror in 'A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff; and an impassioned intervention in the peninsular wars, protesting at British betrayal of Portuguese and Spanish allies at the Convention of Cintra.

In 1808 Sir Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) inflicted a major defeat on Napoleon's forces at the battle of Vimiero, but promptly signed an armistice and convention (negotiated by Sir Hew Dalrymple with General Junot). The Convention permitted the evacuation of the latter's defeated army from Portugal to Bayonne - along with its equipment and its plunder. This disgraceful Convention was regarded by the people of Britain - government ministers excepted - as a betrayal of Britain's allies, Portugal and Spain. Some of the troops repatriated under this agreement fought against Sir John Moore's expeditionary force the following year, forcing his evacuation from northern Spain. Wordsworth's enormous pamphlet on the betrayal of the Iberian patriots by Britain's officer class is one of the most remarkable political documents produced by a Romantic poet. Here the text of W J B Owen's 1968 edition is republished for the bicentennial, with a critical symposium by Richard Gravil, Simon Bainbridge, David Bromwich, Timothy Michael and Patrick Vincent.

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'.