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'.