This original study is the first fully to acknowledge the impact of early grief on Wordsworth's poetry and to integrate it into a critical account of how his art developed from 1787 to 1813.

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• Looks at the impact of grief on Wordsworth's great poetry.
  
• Explains the importance of the poet's great, unfinished epic 'The Recluse' to his work as a whole.
  
• Includes 20 illustrations from original notebooks.
  
• Contains the first annotated text of 'The White Doe of Rylstone'.

Duncan Wu is a Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in English Literature. His numerous publications include A Companion to Romanticism (1998), Romanticism: An Anthology with CD-ROM, (Second Edition, 1998), Romanticism: A Critical Reader (1995), Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology (1997), an edition of William Wordsworth's The Five-Book Prelude (1997) and of William Hazlitt's The Plain-Speaker: Key Essays (1998), all available from Blackwell. He is also the editor of a nine volume edition of The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt (1998).