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First edition of his first collected works, including previously unpublished poems alongside pieces which Wordsworth heavily revised for this publication. The edition is also notable for its preface, which contains his "most extensive discussion of the imagination and of imaginative poetry" (Hodgson, p. 273). This set has been attractively bound with two later works, Peter Bell and The Waggoner. Wordsworth saw his first anthology as his moment to assert the literary unity of his canon and cement his name among the annals of great British poets. Towards this end, he devised a new scheme of poetic organization, in which poems are grouped into categories such as "Poems of the Fancy" and "Poems Founded on the Affections" according to "the power of mind predominant in their production" (ibid.) Anticipating criticism, Wordsworth defends this plan in a lengthy preface and essay which are notorious amongst critics and scholars, whose prevailing consensus is that this scheme is less systematic than idiosyncratic. Regardless, the great importance Wordsworth placed on the arrangement of the poems was fundamental in shaping the edition, upon which he hoped his legacy and national image would be judged. Volume I is bound with Peter Bell in the second edition, called for a fortnight after the first due to intense public demand. Wordsworth originally wrote this piece in 1798 but excluded it from his Lyrical Ballads. News of the impending publication of Peter Bell in 1819 First edition of his first collected works, including previously unpublished poems alongside pieces which Wordsworth heavily revised for this publication. The edition is also notable for its preface, which contains his "most extensive discussion of the imagination and of imaginative poetry" (Hodgson, p. 273). This set has been attractively bound with two later works, Peter Bell and The Waggoner. Wordsworth saw his first anthology as his moment to assert the literary unity of his canon and cement his name among the annals of great British poets. Towards this end, he devised a new scheme of poetic organization, in which poems are grouped into categories such as "Poems of the Fancy" and "Poems Founded on the Affections" according to "the power of mind predominant in their production" (ibid.) Anticipating criticism, Wordsworth defends this plan in a lengthy preface and essay which are notorious amongst critics and scholars, whose prevailing consensus is that this scheme is less systematic than idiosyncratic. Regardless, the great importance Wordsworth placed on the arrangement of the poems was fundamental in shaping the edition, upon which he hoped his legacy and national image would be judged. Volume I is bound with Peter Bell in the second edition, called for a fortnight after the first due to intense public demand. Wordsworth originally wrote this piece in 1798 but excluded it from his Lyrical Ballads. News of the impending publication of Peter Bell in 1819 reached John Hamilton Reynolds, who caused a public spectacle by rushing out a pastiche of the work before it had appeared. Wordsworth released his highly anticipated original one week later and saw "his most immediate sales success" (Gill, p. 332). He then swiftly published another earlier poem, The Waggoner, which he first composed in 1806; its first edition is bound into the second volume. READ MORE Three works in two vols, octavo (209 x 126 mm). Near-contemporary diced calf, spines with two green labels and elaborate floral tooling in compartments, covers bordered with twin gilt fillet and a foliate roll, board edges and turn-ins decorated in gilt, marbled endpapers and edges. With 2 copper engravings by John Charles Bromley and an aquatint by Samuel William Reynolds as frontispieces, all after Sir George Beaumont. Bookplate of Plymouth Iron Company in each volume, overlaid in the first with the bookplate of the Fothergill family, who acquired the company in 1862; hand-inked monograph of one A.J.C. on front free endpapers verso. Spines lightly and uniformly sunned, a little rubbing, usual oxidization of plates, sporadic light foxing. A near-fine set. Cornell Wordsworth Collection 30, 47, 49; Patton, pp. 8-12; Reed A13, A24b, A25; Wise, Bibliography 11, 16-17; Wise, Two Lake Poets, pp. 17-19, 21-2. Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, 1990; John A. Hodgson, "Poems of the Imagination, Allegories of

Originally published in 1798 in collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'Lyrical Ballads' is regarded as a seminal work in the English Romantic movement.