William Wordsworth

Life and writing

The Poetry Foundation identifies Wordsworth with English Romantic poetry and describes his interest in the relationship between people and nature and in everyday speech. Its account gives his lifetime as 1770–1850 and identifies Lyrical Ballads as a collaboration with Coleridge. This profile keeps that biographical setting separate from the selected passages’ source references. The linked 1798 volume is one edition of a changing collection, rather than evidence that every anthology quotation belongs to the same printing.

The Tintern Abbey passage describes a sense of connection running through landscape and human thought; its English counterpart matches under limited punctuation, spacing and case comparison. The Tables Turned challenges a way of learning that destroys what it examines, then calls for receptive attention. That counterpart has forms where the archive has form. Reading the two poems together shows distinct poetic situations rather than one simple rule against thought or study. The profile preserves both archive wordings and directs readers to the complete poems.

Reading this voice

Read the Tintern Abbey passage with the recollection and reflection that surround it, then compare The Tables Turned and its closing invitation to receive experience. The first selected extract matches the linked text under limited normalization; the second differs in form/forms. The jointly authored volume contains distinct poems and voices. This reading connection does not merge Wordsworth with Coleridge or claim that every Wordsworth-labelled record has been independently verified.

Subjects to explore

Words to begin with

• A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,— A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.
• Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; / Our meddling intellect / Misshapes the beauteous form of things: / We murder to dissect.