[.ca] Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth (ISBN 0375759417)

Wandering lonely as a cloud:
To me, poetry is like a swimming pool into which I have to dip my toe to test the temperature of the water before I jump in. I have to take it just a little bit at a time and allow myself to absorb it as well as enjoy it, and this volume of Wordsworth is something I find accessible and welcoming but challenging enough to engage my interest. Unlike his contemporaries of the Romantic movement like Blake and Byron who immersed themselves in wild fantasy and dark mythology, Wordsworth writes about things just about everybody can relate to -- nature, neighbors, family, nation, self-realization, glow-worms -- using direct language that avoids obscure metaphors. Granted, not many of us these days find the opportunity to observe a shepherd at work or hike over the Alps, but Wordsworth did, and tells us about it with imagination and exuberance. The characters in Wordsworth's poems are vagrants, wanderers, beggars, figures from local legends, generally people who live outside of the mainstream or are forgotten by society, the humblest of the humble. There is Johnny the errant Idiot Boy, who is sent off on a horse to fetch a doctor for his mother's ailing friend but instead takes a personal journey governed by his limited imagination. There is the isolated Lucy, "a violet by a mossy stone" who "dwelt among the untrodden ways." There is old Timothy the Childless Father, who tries sorrowfully to maintain his spirits by continuing his hunting excursions after a period of mourning for the death of his last daughter. The central piece in this collection is "The Prelude," Wordsworth's autobiographical poem. After explaining his desire to look beyond traditional poetical subjects like history and chivalry, he proceeds to document the development of his aesthetic, noting the importance of solitude to a budding poet, discussing his years at Cambridge and his undistinguished academic performance, his walking tour through Europe at the time of the French Revolution, and his sympathies for the common man arising from his love of nature. Several sonnets written around 1803 show him turning his attention to national matters, such as lamentations for England's lack of current literary figures as great as Milton and calls for defense against Napoleonic invasion ("To the Men of Kent," "In the Pass of Killicranky"). Adoration of nature is Wordworth's most salient attribute, and, having found his pictorial voice from an early age ("An Evening Walk" is astonishingly sophisticated verse for a seventeen-year-old to have written), he devotes the lion's share of his poetry to idylls, pastorals, dithyrambic odes to the beauty of the the landscapes around his boyhood home in Grasmere. With the exception of some London street scenes in "The Prelude" and elsewhere, there are very few references in his poetry to urbanization and industrialization; reading it, one would think England a permanently medieval country of quiet rustic villages and sparsely populated woodlands. It would seem that materialism and the chaos of living in an increasingly technological society mattered not at all to Wordsworth, and his poetry has all the more longevity because of it.