Wordsworth's Political Writings

This reading text of the four main political texts produced by William Wordsworth will enable readers to follow the political peregrinations of a major poet who, as he said to Orville Dewey, an American visitor, gave twelve hours thought to social questions for each hour he devoted to poetry.



The book includes the Jacobin A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793), infused with the doctrines of Tom Paine; the liberal republican 'prose poem' The Convention of Cintra (1809), the Tory apologetics of Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland (1818), and the welfare-state philosophy of the 1835 Postscript in which Wordsworth married the Coleridgean concept of a society leavened by its 'clerisy' to a devastating critique of laissez-faire 'political economy'. The extensive commentary provided by Owen & Smyser to these texts has been converted to footnotes for ease of use.



W. J. B. Owen's scholarly work includes his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1957), Wordsworth as Critic (1969), Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism (1974) and his edition of The Fourteen-Book Prelude for the Cornell Wordsworth (1985). Jane Worthington Smyser is best known for her Wordsworth's Reading of Roman Prose (1946).