title: Selected Poems
author:  William Wordsworth 
description: William Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth in the Lake District and educated at Cambridge. As a young man he was fired with enthusiasm for the French Revolution but the year he spent in France after graduating left him disillusioned with radical politics. He turned more seriously to literature and, in collaboration with his friend Coleridge, produced Lyrical Ballads (1798). His return to the Lake District in 1799 marked the beginning of his most productive period as a poet, during which he wrote his most famous long poem, The Prelude (1805). Stephen Gill a Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He holds degrees from Oxford and Edinburgh Universities and is a long-serving member of the Wordsworth Trust. He has written William Wordsworth: A Life (1989) and Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998).
zlib_text: WILLIAM WORDSWORTH IN CONTEXT
  William Wordsworth’s poetry responded to the enormous literary,
  political, cultural, technological and social changes that the poet lived
  through during his lifetime (1770‒1850), and to his own transforma-
  tion from young radical inspired by the French Revolution to Poet
  Laureate and supporter of the establishment. The poet of the ‘ego-
  tistical sublime’ who wrote the pioneering autobiographical master-
  piece, The Prelude, and whose work is remarkable for its investigation
  of personal impressions, memories and experiences, is also the poet
  who is critically engaged with the cultural and political developments
  of his era. William Wordsworth in Context presents thirty-ﬁve concise
  chapters on contexts crucial for an understanding and appreciation of
  this leading Romantic poet. It focuses on his life, circle and poetic
  composition; on his reception and inﬂuence; on the signiﬁcance of late
  eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary contexts; and on the
  h