The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth — Volume 1 (of 8)

William Wordsworth fundamentally changed what poetry could be. Before him, the grand subjects belonged to kings and classical myths. He looked at a field of daffodils, a child wandering alone, a leech-gatherer on the moors, and saw something far more important: the human mind in conversation with the universe. This volume collects the poems he himself deemed worthy of preservation, along with his legendary prefaces where he explains his revolutionary belief that poetry should be written in the language of ordinary people, not aristocratic affectation. Here you'll find the work that launched English Romanticism into the world, poems that discover the sublime in a sunset and the philosophical in a walk through the woods. Reading Wordsworth means learning to see. He argued that our feelings at the sight of nature are 'a motion of the soul' that links us to something eternal. These are the poems that taught generations of readers to pay attention to the world around them, to find meaning in memory, and to trust their own emotional responses as a form of knowledge. For anyone who has ever stood somewhere beautiful and felt, without knowing why, that they were exactly where they were meant to be.