Here are 100 books that William Wordsworth fans have personally recommended if you like
William Wordsworth.
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I’ve been writing poems since an inspirational period of study in Stirling in my twenties, when I did a lot of hill walking in the Scottish Highlands. For me, poetry that doesn’t move you, that doesn’t make you feel, is just words on a page. I love poems that make you shiver as they incongruously bear the full load of life’s mystery. I like all kinds of poetry but have a special place reserved for nature poems, poems that find the heart and soul in the landscape, rivers, and wildlife.
Alice Oswald is one of our best living poets, renowned for her nature poetry and particularly her long poem about the River Dart in Somerset. I love this first collection, full of heart-stopping attention to detail and transcendental shiver. She follows very much in the tradition of our great poets writing about nature. Try the poem "Mountains" for a Wordsworthian sense of a hidden, almost pantheistic presence in the world.
This is Alice Oswald's first book of poems. More confident and achieved than many first collections, it shows her writing in an already distinct voice. The poems are intensely musical: she recites them from memory. Influenced by the rhythms of Hopkins, they speak passionately of nature and love. They have a religious sense of mystery, and try to express the intangible in marvellously vivid language. A long poem, `The Wise Men of Gotham', which makes up the second part of the book, is, by contrast, a version of the folk-legend about the three men who went to sea in a…
I’ve been writing poems since an inspirational period of study in Stirling in my twenties, when I did a lot of hill walking in the Scottish Highlands. For me, poetry that doesn’t move you, that doesn’t make you feel, is just words on a page. I love poems that make you shiver as they incongruously bear the full load of life’s mystery. I like all kinds of poetry but have a special place reserved for nature poems, poems that find the heart and soul in the landscape, rivers, and wildlife.
The first collection by former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes includes one of the most stunning poems about the connection between poet, pen, and nature in the form of "The Thought-Fox." Hughes has a pared back, often disturbing vision of the world that seizes your attention. If you like this don’t stop, there are plenty of other wonderful books by Hughes, especially his retelling of the "Tales from Ovid" and "The Birthday Letters," his poems about his relationship with his first wife, the equally brilliant Sylvia Plath.
Published in 1957, Hawk in the Rain was Ted Hughes's first collection of poems. It won the New York Poetry Centre First Publication Award, for which the judges were W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore, and the Somerset Maugham Award, and it was acclaimed by every reviewer from A. Alvarez to Edwin Muir. When Robin Skelton wrote, 'All looking for the emergence of a major poet must buy it', he was right to see in it the promise of what many now regard as the most important body of work by any poet of the twentieth century.
I’ve been writing poems since an inspirational period of study in Stirling in my twenties, when I did a lot of hill walking in the Scottish Highlands. For me, poetry that doesn’t move you, that doesn’t make you feel, is just words on a page. I love poems that make you shiver as they incongruously bear the full load of life’s mystery. I like all kinds of poetry but have a special place reserved for nature poems, poems that find the heart and soul in the landscape, rivers, and wildlife.
Sherry Ross is an American poet who writes about loss, motherhood, and rebirth. Her nature poems reverberate with extraordinary detail and imagery, for instance, the running girl who finds the field has ended in a "party dress of hunter green," where "the trance of sunlight breaks, brings forgetfulness of open fields, distant voices, summer games." She ventures into the forest, with its ‘palate of light and dark’. Read these poems for their aching blend of sadness and joy.
POET magazine says of Ms. Ross' poetry that she is able to "extend the everyday moment into deep mythology, using the commonplace as an avenue into the emotions." In SEEDS OF THE POMEGRANATE, Sherry uses the ancient Greek myth of Persephone as a metaphor for her own life. In the myth of Persephone, which is retold in the book's forward, Persephone is abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. Her mother, the earth goddess Demeter, is both grief stricken and enraged at her daughter's disappearance. Obsessed with finding her daughter she neglects her duties and the land dries up…
I’ve been writing poems since an inspirational period of study in Stirling in my twenties, when I did a lot of hill walking in the Scottish Highlands. For me, poetry that doesn’t move you, that doesn’t make you feel, is just words on a page. I love poems that make you shiver as they incongruously bear the full load of life’s mystery. I like all kinds of poetry but have a special place reserved for nature poems, poems that find the heart and soul in the landscape, rivers, and wildlife.
What makes Scottish poet Barbara Lennox so special is her ability to draw on her scientific background, striking an exquisite balance between a mechanistic view of nature and a more mysterious, creative approach. I love poems about birds and flight and her poems about an owl ("ears inhale every sound"), hawk ("she’s light/ ready for the off/ half-poised for flight"), and the extinct Archaeopteryx, "smeared to a layer of limestone" are some of the finest written. On top of that, Lennox writes astonishing poems about the Scottish Highlands, where I’ve spent some of my happiest times.
Poems of Love, Loss, Life and Death The poetry of Barbara Lennox has been inspired by the natural world, history and mythology, scientific ideas and the many facets of the human condition, from love to loss, and from life to death and everything in between. The poems are thoughtful, quirky, questioning and lyrical. A skilful use of metaphor and language throws a fresh light on topics as diverse as a fossil bird, a mythical tree, the inheritance pattern of comb shape in chickens, and the final journey we all have to make.
I’m a poet, lover of great literature, and an English professor who has served as faculty advisor to my university’s student-run literary journal. I caught the bug as a teenager when I first started reading and memorizing poems that moved and intrigued me. Since then, reading and writing poetry—and having the pleasure of teaching it to students—has been my best way of checking in with myself to see what’s most important to me that I may have lost sight of in the daily bustle. It’s also my best way of going beyond myself—allowing my imagination to carry me to unexpected places.
I love Wordsworth’s poetry (and his comments on the creative process) for its beauty and its importance to the history of the art form. His best poems—especially Tintern Abbey and his Intimations or Immortality Ode—tell psychological and spiritual tales about the gains and losses of growing up, and the role that nature can play in a person’s maturation.
His Preface to Lyrical Ballads lays out a Romantic program for poetry that has been hugely influential for two centuries. Wordsworth’s idea that poetry comes from “emotion recollected in tranquility” and captures the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” encapsulates how, for me and countless other writers, reflecting on personal memories provides a storehouse of poetic material.
William Wordsworth (1771-1850) is the foremost of the English Romantic poets. He was much influenced by the events of the French Revolution in his youth, and he deliberately broke away from the artificial diction of the Augustan and neo-classical tradition of the eighteenth century. He sought to write in the language of ordinary men and women, of ordinary thoughts, sights and sounds, and his early poetry represents this fresh approach to his art.
Wordsworth spent most of his adult life in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy and his wife Mary, by whom…
Rupert Read is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, where he works alongside some of the world’s leading climate scientists. He is a campaigner for the Green Party of England and Wales, a former spokesperson for the Extinction Rebellion, and co-founder of the Climate Activists Network, GreensCAN.
Why did Wordsworth and Coleridge decide to produce this book, together? Well, basically, it was because they regarded themselves as having something to say, something to contribute that went way beyond the sphere of pleasing or thought-provoking in a purely literary sense.
The form of the poetry was very shocking at the time and they were also bringing a new point to poetry. And that point is what really brings this very close to eco-philosophy. What they tried to do in theLyrical Balladswas to produce a sort of poetic manifesto for thinking about nature in a different way, in a more serious way, than was customary at the time.
Wordsworth and Coleridge's joint collection of poems has often been singled out as the founding text of English Romanticism. Within this initially unassuming, anonymous volume were many of the poems that came to define their age and which have continued to delight readers ever since, including 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', the 'Lucy' poems, 'Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey', 'A Slumber did my Spirit seal' and many more. Wordsworth's famous Preface is a manifesto not just for Romanticism but for poetry in general.
This is the only edition to print both the original 1798…
Where do writers go for distraction? For me it’s usually into the work of other writers and, when I’m done escaping into fiction, I turn to nonfiction and particularly those writers who write about writing. Why? Because it helps refresh my own writing to read those writing with clarity, insight, and coherence when my own process is in danger of fragmenting. What’s more, many writers write so well about the components of writing - voice, structure, narrative or even something as prosaic as getting started - that I am reassured about what I’m trying to do with my own writing.
Even if you don’t want to be a poet, there’s something about playing with poetic form that I think is useful to any writer because it enables you to explore the use of rhythm, metaphor, simile and other ways of honing your consciousness into literary and written form. It demands specificity of description and uniqueness of voice, and Kate Clanchy’s book - she is herself a published poet, writer but also a teacher - gets to the nub of it through examples and exercise, to emerge a more fluent and confident writer, and in whichever form you choose.
Do you want to write a poem? This book will show you 'how to grow your own poem' . . .
Kate Clanchy has been teaching people to write poetry for more than twenty years. Some were old, some were young; some were fluent English speakers, some were not. None of them were confident to start with, but a surprising number went to win prizes and every one finished up with a poem they were proud of, a poem that only they could have written - their own poem.
Kate's big secret is a simple one: is to share other…
I am a neuroscientist best known for my studies and writings exploring the brain basis of consciousness. Trained as a physicist, I was for 27 years a professor of biology and engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena before moving to the Allen Institute in Seattle, where I became the Chief Scientist and then the President in 2015. I published my first paper on the neural correlates of consciousness with the molecular biologist Francis Crick more than thirty years ago.
An extraordinary gem of a booklet that considers the many ways that four lines of a single poem, composed by an 8th century Chinese Buddhist, have been translated into modern idiom. It is amazing how a mere twenty ideograms, depicting a mountain and forest scene devoid of people, can illuminate the variety and subtlety of consciousness. I recommend the 2016 edition with additional translations.
The difficulty (and necessity) of translation is concisely described in Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, a close reading of different translations of a single poem from the Tang Dynasty-from a transliteration to Kenneth Rexroth's loose interpretation. As Octavio Paz writes in the afterword, "Eliot Weinberger's commentary on the successive translations of Wang Wei's little poem illustrates, with succinct clarity, not only the evolution of the art of translation in the modern period but at the same time the changes in poetic sensibility."
I have been a keen walker/hiker/backpacker since I was five when my parents named a local footpath James’s Path. Almost fifty years later, I have walked all over the UK and further afield in the Pyrenees and the Alps, Nepal, and the Antipodes. Walking for me is both a means to an end—to reach mountaineering routes and as exercise—and as an end in itself. Days spent walking can be reflective, social, demanding, and memorable. I always take a book, even if it's a day walk, and two or three if it’s a multiday trip. I hope you’re as energized and stimulated by my suggestions as I’ve been.
Whatever my current passion, from mountaineering to grafting apple trees to hiking, I like to immerse myself in the literature. Simon Armitage’s account of The Pennine Way in the Peak District (UK) is one of my favorite walking memoirs and is informative, eclectic, and funny. In addition, the route starts only a few miles from my house.
I’m walking it with my wife, in sections, so we might meet you on the way! If you’re not a walker, Walking Home may inspire you to start—even to set out on a long-distance footpath.
The wandering poet has always been a feature of our cultural imagination. Odysseus journeys home, his famous flair for storytelling seducing friend and foe. The Romantic poets tramped all over the Lake District searching for inspiration. Now Simon Armitage, with equal parts enthusiasm and trepidation, as well as a wry humor all his own, has taken on Britain's version of our Appalachian Trail: the Pennine Way. Walking "the backbone of England" by day (accompanied by friends, family, strangers, dogs, the unpredictable English weather, and a backpack full of Mars Bars), each evening he gives a poetry reading in a different…
I have been writing and teaching about African American poetry and poetics for more than two decades. My passion began when I kept discovering long-lost poems that were published once, in Black newspapers, and then forgotten. I wondered why I had never learned about Gwendolyn Brooks in school, though I’d read about e.e. cummings and Robert Frost. Once I stumbled on the fact that Claude McKay discovered cummings, I realized how much the questions of influence and power aren’t really central topics in thinking about the genealogy of Black poets and their influence on each other and on poetry in general.
Marilyn Nelson’s poetry is staggeringly good, particularly the way she writes formal poems—sonnets!—in a humble voice, like her sonnet “From an Alabama Farmer.” Nelson’s poem “To the Confederate Dead,” with its epigraph by Allen Tate is a better poem than Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” with which it is in conversation. Nelson’s ‘wreath’ of sonnets, “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” is simply sublime.
Conjuring numerous voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson's new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American individuals and communities.
Poems include the stories of historical figures like Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in 1955, and the inhabitants of Seneca Village, an African American community razed in 1857 for the creation of Central Park. ""Bivouac in a Storm"" tells the story of a group…
