This is a collection of 60 literary periodicals/books in volumes or in single issue form by, about, and related to the life and work of the English poet William Wordsworth. They cover a period of over 200 years.

All periodicals are complete issues in very good condition. Exceptions are noted.      

They are listed chronologically.          

Rare Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from October 1818 to March 1819 (6 issues).  Lovely volume bound in gilt-stamped black cloth. Marbled edges all around. The Table of Contents for each month follow the title-page to the volume, which includes three sonnets by Wordsworth, his only appearance in the monthly, here first printed: “Suggested by Westall’s Views of the Caves in Yorkshire.” The sonnets are introduced by Blackwood’s veterans John Murray and John Wilson, who also pens a 16-page essay, “The Lake School of Poetry: On the Habits of Thought, inculcated by Wordsworth.” 776 page volume. See photo #2.

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for April 1819, here neatly rescued by me from an old damaged bound volume of the monthly. Nice condition. Clear and clean 120 page text. Editor J.G. Lockwood here contributes the 5th of his irregular essays on the so-called (now famous) "Cockney School of Poetry," opening this essay (4 pages) with a positive profile of  Wordsworth followed by attacks on John Keats, Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt and the painter Haydon. 

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for June 1819. Hard to find single issue of the monthly includes an unsigned essay in review of Wordsworth's newly published The Waggoner; to which are added, Sonnets. Includes a generous extract from the poem and it also reprints five of the twelve sonnets that Wordsworth included in the volume just  published by Longman & Co. 

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine from August 1829 to December 1829 (the month of September being in two parts). This is another lovely volume of the Edinburgh monthly. Bound in a handsome gilt-stamped black cloth with marbled boards. It features, in four parts (56 pages), poet Chauncy Hare Townshend’s “An Essay on the Theory and Writings of Wordsworth” (in Part II of September and in the October, November and December issues). The volume is 835 pages. Now a rare find, especially in this very good condition. See photo #2.  

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for March 1841. The writer, critic and philosopher William Henry Smith, long resident of the Lake District, pens a 12 page essay on the works of Wordsworth. Copious excerpts from Peter Bell, Tintern Abbey, other works. Very good complete issue neatly rescued from an old bound volume. See photo #10. 

Littell’s Living Age (Boston) for 22 June 1850. This number neatly rescued by me from an old bound volume of the Boston weekly. 47 pages. It reprints (more than a full page of small print), from the notable London Times, Wordsworth’s obituary.  

Littell’s Living Age (Boston) for 14 September 1850. This single issue of 47 pages is also neatly rescued by me from an old bound volume of the Boston weekly. It offers 5 and ½ pages, reprinted from the London Examiner, in review of  Wordsworth’s final version of The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind; an Autobiographical Poem. Published by Moxon in London. 

Littell’s Living Age (Boston) for 28 September 1850. This 47-page single issue also rescued from an old bound volume of the Boston weekly. A very nice complete issue. It opens with a 16-page essay by the young Scottish literary critic and historian David Masson in review of the 1849 Poetical Works edition of Wordsworth. This is a contemporary essay of some interest.

Littell's Living Age (Boston) for 21 December 1850. This complete number offers a column on the precise details from the scene of "The Grave of Wordsworth." This issue also rescued from the above mentioned bound volume. 

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for September 1871. The magazine at this time offered a series of extended essays (10) by Margaret Oliphant headed "A Century of Great Poets, from 1750 Downwards." This is the "Wordsworth" installment, one of the longest and best of her efforts. It's 27 pages. A very good complete issue of the monthly that I neatly removed from an old damaged bound volume of the magazine.    

Littell’s Living Age (Boston) for 9 May 1874. This 63-page issue of the Boston weekly opens with one of the great essays on the work of the poet, the youthful Walter H. Pater’s “On Wordsworth”. This copy neatly rescued by me from an old and damaged bound volume of the magazine. Here first printed in America. It had first appeared in the English Fortnightly Review a month earlier.

The Athenaeum (London) for 11 July 1874. This number opens with a full two page essay in review of the just published for the first time Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland, A.D. 1803 by Dorothy Wordsworth, the poet's sister. Edited by J.C. Shairp, LL.D (and see below). 

Littell's Living Age (Boston) for 29 August 1874. "On Reading [Dorothy] Wordsworth's Recollections of a Journey in Scotland in 1803 With Her Brother and Coleridge." Lyrical verse by "Arran," first published a week or two earlier in the London Spectator. These lines (3 stanzas) follow the publication, for the first time, of Dorothy's journal, now deemed a classic, written in 1803 following the trip, which had found no publisher at the time and had now been published for the first time, many years after her death. See above. This issue rescued by me from an old bound volume. 

The NY Independent for 25 September 1884. This is a complete issue (32 pages) of the New York weekly (newspaper format, oversize.) It offers more than two full columns in review of Wordsworth’s great-niece (1840-1932) Elizabeth Wordsworth’s new volume of verse, Indoors and Out: Poems, recently published in London.

The Athenaeum (London) for 28 August 1886. Unsigned, longer (a full page and 1/2) essay in review of Edmund Lee's Dorothy Wordsworth: The Story of a Sister's Love (Clarke & Company). 

The Athenaeum (London) for 19 November 1887. Unsigned opening feature essay in the weekly (more than two full pages) in review of Memorials of Coleorton: being Letters from Coleridge, Wordsworth and his Sister, Southey, and Sir Walter Scott to Sir George and Lady Beaumont (2 volumes, Edinburgh). Edited by William Knight. 

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for October 1890. This issue of the monthly features “Sonnets by Wordsworth” with 11 drawings by the talented artist Alfred Parsons. “A Parsonage in Oxfordshire,” “Rural Ceremony,” etc. A very good copy with a few tiny chips to paper wrappers.

The Bibelot for August 1898. This monthly issue of the Maine publication reprints, in booklet form, English poet William Watson’s memorable poem, first published as the title-poem of a collection of his work in 1890, Wordsworth’s Grave (10 pages).

The Athenaeum (London) for 28 January 1905. This issue of the weekly literary journal prints a column headed “Wordsworthiana” by Wordsworth scholar Nowell Smith who announces his discovery of a literary source for some few lines in Wordsworth’s poem An Evening Walk, along with related material. Smith’s book, Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, was published later in this same year and has been much reprinted ever since.  

The Atlantic Monthly for July 1905. This is an 8 page article detailing the English Lake District, neatly removed by me from an old damaged issue of the monthly, headed "Wordsworthshire." It's by the able Thomas Wentworth Higginson. See photo #11.  

The energetic Rosaline Masson pens a 12-page article headed "An 'Inspired Little Creature' and the Poet Wordsworth" (narrative of, and correspondence between, Wordsworth's first cousin, her poetically inspired young daughter, and Wordsworth beginning in the 1830s) in the Living Age (Boston) Xmas Eve, 1910. The article had first appeared a month or two earlier in the English Fortnightly Review.  

Littell's Living Age (Boston) for 5 July 1913. E. Cecil Roberts contributes an essay (6 pages) of some note headed "The Ascendancy of Wordsworth." 

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America for June 1948. Wallace W. Douglas pens a 16-page essay headed “Wordsworth as a Business Man.”

The June 1956 number of the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. Edward E. Bostetter here pens a 17-page essay on the subject of Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814). It’s headed “Wordsworth’s Dim and Perilous Way.”

The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America for the Third Quarter 1958. This number offers a 14-page “Bibliography of Wordsworth in American Periodicals Through 1825.”

The September 1958 number of the Publications of the Modern Language Association. Stephen Maxfield Parrish here pens an 8-page essay on “The Wordsworth-Coleridge Controversy.” Longstanding differences here, between the two, on “the nature of poetic diction.”   

The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth's Major Poems. Expertly drawn contrarian analysis by the award-winning American poet, one of his earliest publications, David Ferry. Hardcover, University of Wesleyan Press. 1959. 181 pages. First edition in very good condition in a dust wrapper that shows a little edge wear. See photo #9. 

Publications of the Modern Language Association for June 1960. Bennett Weaver here contributes a 7-page essay headed, “Wordsworth: Poet of the Unconquerable Mind.”

The New York Review of Books for 28 January 1965. The young (age 31) Christopher Ricks here reviews, in an essay headed “The Greatness of Wordsworth,” Geoffrey H. Hartman’s Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814, recently published by Yale.

The New York Review of Books for 29 December 1966. This number offers a caricature of Wordsworth by David Levine and a review, headed “An Ugly Faced Man,” by F.W. Bateson following the publication of Mary Moorman’s William Wordsworth: The Later Years 1803-1850.

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America for May 1967. This number (see photo #8) includes the able Robert Langbaum's 8 page essay "The Evolution of Soul in Wordsworth's Poetry."  

The Yale Review for Summer 1969. Nice clean issue is complete and includes two essays headed “Romanticism Redefined.” They are by Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest Romance,” and by the able Geoffrey Hartman, “Wordsworth.”  

The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, #3, 1974. This number features a 14-page essay by Michael C, Jaye. “Wordsworth at Work: Ms. Book II of The Prelude.”

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 1 September 1978. John Beer here reviews, headed “Wordsworth and his Great Work,” the Beth Darlington-edited Cornell Wordsworth’s Home at Grasmere: Part First, Book First of ‘The Recluse’, and the Alan G. Hill-edited Volume 3 of The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Later Years, Part I, 1821-1828. 

Publications of the Modern Language Association for October 1978. Don Bialostosky offers a 12-page essay. “Coleridge’s Interpretation of Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads.”

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 1 August 1980. Edinburgh scholar W.W. Robson opens this issue of the weekly with an essay in review of the Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill authored William Wordsworth: The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850. The essay is noted on the cover of the issue as “Wordsworth’s Preludes.”

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 9 September 1983. David Bromwich here contributes (a full oversize page) an essay in review of the Robert Osborn-edited edition (Cornell) of Wordsworth’s The Borderers, and of Jonathan Wordsworth’s William Wordsworth: The Borders of Vision, published by the Oxford University Press.

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 28 June 1985. “The Drudge of Dove Cottage” heads a list of content on the cover of this issue of the weekly and  Norman Fruman begins the number with an essay in review of the Robert Gittings/Jo Manton-edited biography of Dorothy Wordsworth and of the Alan G. Hill-edited Letters of Dorothy Wordsworth. Both published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford.

The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America for December 1987. This number offers an essay (8 pages) by Mark L. Reed headed “Wordsworth on Wordsworth and Much Else: New Conversational Memoranda.” This from the papers of Wordsworth’s nephew, Charles Wordsworth. He notes that Wordsworth and Lord Byron dined together on the 18th of June 1815. The day of the Battle of Waterloo. 

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for December 11—17, 1987. This is a ¾ of a full oversize page report by David Bromwich of the current exhibition at the New York Public Library of “Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism.“

Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry. This is a hardcover old Library reading copy only of a volume edited by Richard Machin and Christopher Norris. Cambridge University Press, 1988. It includes two essays related to Wordsworth: Gayatri C. Spivak’s “Sex and History in The Prelude (1805): Books IX to XIII”; and, Jonathan Arac’s “Rounding Lines: The Prelude and Critical Revision.”

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for May 5—11, 1989. Norman Fruman opens this weekly issue of the literary journal with a longer review of Stephen Gill’s noteworthy, William Wordsworth: A Life.

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 27 August 1993. Norman Fruman here pens a full page and 1/2 (oversize) in review of the James Butler and Karen Green-edited William Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797-1800 (Cornell University Press).   

The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, March 1996. This number of the journal features Eric C. Walker’s 24-page article, “The Plan to Publish Peter Bell: A New Wordsworth Letter” (and see below, 21 January 2005). 

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 18 September 1998. This is a Special (cover feature) “The Romantic Vision 1798-1998” issue. It includes, among many essays on various aspects of Romanticism, Stephen Gill’s opening the issue essay in review of Kenneth R. Johnston’s The Hidden Wordsworth and there is another essay on Stephen Gill’s Wordsworth and the Victorians by Daniel Karlin. See photo #1. 

The Hudson Review for Autumn 1999. Alfred Corn here opens this issue of the quarterly with a 19-page essay headed "The Wordsworth Retrospective." This on the bicentennial year of the first appearance of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads and the "Golden Age" that followed. See photo #6. 

The New Criterion for February 2000. Martin Greenberg contributes an essay of some interest: "Hazlitt & Wordsworth." 12 pages.  

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 17 January 2003. Angela Leighton here reviews Juliet Barker’s Viking-published Wordsworth: A Life in Letters.

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 21 January 2005. Seamus Perry here reviews the William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Hamilton Reynolds volume Peter Bell: The 1819 Texts, edited by Carlo M. Bajetta. It's headed here "The Little Horror Show." Published in Milan. Benjamin Robert Haydon's portrait of Wordsworth from 1818 is reproduced. 

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 14 July 2006. Seamus Perry (who is also a Trustee of the Wordsworth Trust) here pens a long essay for the “Commentary” feature of the weekly headed “Joy Perplexed” This on the topic of “Optimism and Complication in Wordsworth, T.H. Green and A.C. Bradley.” 

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 2 November 2007. This issue serves-up “Commentary” space for Dan Jacobson’s essay headed “Border Crossings: From Egotism to Epic–How Wordsworth’s Inspired ‘Breathings’ Contain the World that Surrounds Him.” 

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 6 April 2012. Peter McDonald opens this issue of the weekly with an extended essay in review of the Stephen Gill-edited 840-page selection of Wordsworth’s work published by the Oxford University Press, called simply, William Wordsworth. “A great critic’s account of how Wordsworth rearranged, rewrote and restructured his works.” He also reviews Gill’s Wordsworth’s Revisitings, also published by the  OUP.

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 6 December 2013. Nicholas Roe contributes an essay in review of the 2-volume Mark L. Reed-edited A Bibliography of William Wordsworth 1787-1930. 

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 14 March 2014. This issue of the weekly prints Nicholas Roe’s review essay of Lucy Newlyn’s William and Dorothy Wordsworth and of Katie Waldegrave’s The Poet’s Daughters: Dora Wordsworth and Sara Coleridge.

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 18 July 2014. Pamela Clemit contributes a review of the Nicholas Halmi-edited Wordsworth’s Poetry and Prose (Norton) and of Tim Fulford’s The Late Poetry of the Lake Poets: Romanticism Revised (Cambridge University Press).

The New York Review of Books for 23 February 2017. Critic and teacher Helen Vendler here pens a long essay in review of the James Engell and Michael D. Raymond introduced and edited volume of Wordsworth’s The Prelude: 1805.

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 18 December 2018. Jeremy Adler here pens a two page “Commentary” essay headed “On Steely Wings: Wordsworth, [Friedrich] Klopstock and the Poetry of Skating.”

The London Review of Books for 4 July 2019. This issue offers 3 full oversize pages by Colin Burrow in review of Nicholas Rowe's Wordsworth and Coleridge:  The Radical Years and of Matthew Bevis's Wordsworth's Fun.  It's headed "A Solemn and Unsexual Man." 

The Times Literary Supplement (London) for 11 October 2019. This number offers Andrew Motion's essay in review of Matthew Bevis's Wordsworth's Fun; of Adam Nicolson's The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and their Year Of Marvels; and, of Tim Fulford's Wordsworth's Poetry 1815-1845. Also, Fiona Stafford reviews Peter Dale and Brandon C. Yen's Wordsworth's Gardens and Flowers. 

AND

The New York Review of Books for 24 September 2020. This number reproduces a first-rate Max Beerbohm caricature headed "William Wordsworth in the Lake District, at cross-purposes." It also features an extended essay by the informative Kathryn Hughes in review of the recently published: Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World by Jonathan Bate; a second review of Adam Nicolson's The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworth's, and their Year of Marvels; and, the second edition of the notable Stephen Gill's William Wordsworth: A Life.