William Wordsworth: Poems. Selected by Seamus Heaney - Hardcover

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was one of the most influential of the Romantic poets. He grew up in the Lake District, and was educated at Cambridge. His friendship with S. T. Coleridge led to their joint project, Lyrical Ballads, which was published in 1798. At the same time, Wordsworth began work on what was to become The Prelude, which was first published three months after his death, in 1850. He became poet laureate in 1843.

Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection of poems, appeared in 1966, and was followed by poetry, criticism and translations which established him as the leading poet of his generation. In 1995 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and twice won the Whitbread Book of the Year, for The Spirit Level (1996) and Beowulf (1999). Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O'Driscoll, appeared in 2008; Human Chain, his last volume of poems, was awarded the 2010 Forward Prize for Best Collection. He died in 2013. His translation of Virgil's Aeneid Book VI was published posthumously in 2016 to critical acclaim.

"In his fine new biography of Wordsworth, Stephen Gill...paints a fresh and moving portrait of the poet....He tells his story in a compact prose that is blessedly free of jargon and rich in detail."--The New York Times Book Review

"Excellent....This is the kind of biography which any writer would be delighted to inspire, let alone to deserve. Stephen Gill detects the underlying direction and momentum of Wordsworth's life, tracing through the impulses of diurnal reality the permanent being of the man."--The Times (London)

"Gill...is superbly equipped to write the first full-scale biography of the poet in twenty-five years. Since the second volume of Mary Moorman's richly detailed account appeared in 1965, a whole generation of scholars has transformed the study of Wordsworth, and Gill has been at or near the center of this revolution....An indispensable book."--The Bloomsbury Review

"[A] solid, intelligent, and highly readable biography....Gill sends us back to the poetry with renewed interest, while enlarging our respect for the poet's rugged commitment to his muse."--Publishers Weekly

"Gill does a superb job of interrelating the life and work of this particularly autobiographical poet."--Library Journal