Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes

Wordsworth, Poems. In Two Volumes (1807); review by James Montgomery, Eclectic Review, IV (Jan. 1808), 35–43. Montgomery reviews Lyrical Ballads and its Preface, as well as the 1807 Poems, noticing — as have subsequent commentators — the sharp divergence of Wordsworth’s style in the two publications. Montgomery’s dislike of the minor pieces in the 1807 volumes can be contrasted with his judgment, in a note to his poem The West Indies, that Southey’s Madoc was “the noblest narrative Poem in the English language, after the Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost.”