Gillen D'Arcy Wood's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Gillen D'Arcy Wood recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Gillen D'Arcy Wood's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
Recommended by Gillen D'Arcy Wood, and 1 others.

Gillen D'Arcy Wood1819 was Keats’s annus mirabilus, in which he wrote his famous Odes: to the Grecian Urn, the Nightingale, etc. But he also wrote the sumptuous ‘Eve of St. Agnes’, which I introduce to my students as ‘the most beautiful poem in the English language.’ (Source)

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2

The Major Works

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was a Romantic poet of radical imaginings, living in an age of change. His tempestuous life and friendship with Byron, and his tragically early death, at times threatened to overwhelm his legacy as a poet, but today his standing as one of the foremost English authors is assured. This freshly edited collection - the fullest one-volume selection in English - includes all but one of the longer poems, from Queen Mab onwards, in their entirety. Only Laon and Cythna is excerpted, in a generous selection. As well as works such as Prometheus... more
Recommended by Gillen D'Arcy Wood, and 1 others.

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3

William Blake

Selected Poems

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour"

William Blake wrote some of the most moving and memorable verse in the English language. Deeply committed to visionary and imaginative experience, yet also fiercely engaged with the turbulent politics of his era, he is now recognised as a major contributor to the Romantic Movement.

This edition presents Blake's poems in their literary categories and genres to which they belong: his much-loved lyrics, ballads,...
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Recommended by Gillen D'Arcy Wood, and 1 others.

Gillen D'Arcy WoodEven the radical young artist-types in London thought he was barking mad. He certainly took the Romantic poet turn inward to extremes, creating a quasi-Biblical inner landscape of the mind through his art and poems. (Source)

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4

The Major Works

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic, and radical thinker, exerted an enormous influence over contemporaries as varied as Wordsworth, Southey and Lamb. He was also a dedicated reformer, and set out to use his reputation as a public speaker and literary philosopher to change the course of English thought.

This collection represents the best of Coleridge's poetry from every period of his life, particularly his prolific early years, which produced The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan. The central section of the book is devoted to his most...
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Recommended by Gillen D'Arcy Wood, and 1 others.

Gillen D'Arcy WoodFrost at Midnight, 1798. (Source)

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5

The Major Works

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) has long been one of the best-known and best-loved English poets. The Lyrical Ballads, written with Coleridge, is a landmark in the history of English romantic poetry. His celebration of nature and of the beauty and poetry in the commonplace embody a unified and coherent vision that was profoundly innovative.

This volume presents the poems in their order of composition and in their earliest completed state, enabling the reader to trace Wordsworth's poetic development and to share the experience of his contemporaries. It includes a large...
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Recommended by Gillen D'Arcy Wood, Lucy Newlyn, and 2 others.

Lucy NewlynStephen Gill’s edition gives us William Wordsworth’s career from the beginning right the way through, and it’s a long career – he started writing very young. Gill gives it to us collection by collection, so we see Wordsworth emerging at publication moments. The poems are selected with considerable care, and the book gives a very even account of Wordsworth’s whole life as a writer – prose as well... (Source)

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