The Simple Wordsworth

First published in 1960, this book studies Wordsworth’s ‘simple’ poems, such as the Lyrical Ballads, as products of a sophisticated and powerfully successful literary genius. The author aims to approach the poems as perhaps Wordsworth expected his first readers to; but as they have never been in fact. The result of this approach is to discover a Wordsworth far different to that which he has previously been presented as — the ‘Sage of Rydal’ at one extreme and a naïve perpetrator of poetical blunders at the other — and, the author argues, a far more exciting one. This book will be of interest to students of literature.