The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth — Volume 6 (of 8)

This sixth volume of Wordsworth's collected verse gathers poems from 1814 to 1820, a period when the young revolutionary of Lyrical Ballads had become the elder statesman of English poetry, and the transformation is breathtaking. Here is a Wordsworth wrestling with grief and mythology in 'Laodamia,' where a wife confronts the impossible choice between holding her dead husband's shade and releasing him to proper rest. Here too are the Scottish poems ('Yarrow Visited,' 'The Brown's Cell') where ancient folklore rises from the moors like mist, and the poet meditates on how landscape carries the weight of history in its very stones. These are not the spontaneous outpourings of a young man; they are considered, architectural works, dense with allusion and controlled passion. Yet the beating heart remains the same: the conviction that nature speaks, that solitude nourishes, and that the remote and the ordinary are both doorways to the sublime. For anyone who believes poetry can still quiet the noise of the modern world, these pages offer that rare thing, stillness, and something like wisdom.