These early poems, made readily accessible to a general readership for the first time, offer a unique opportunity to examine the apprenticeship of a great writer from the outset of his career. These poems reveal how the traumas of early life forged his vision and produced the insights that would make Wordsworth one of the most gifted celebrants of the human spirit. In effect, they chronicle the evolution of British Romanticism out of the aesthetic morass of the late eighteenth century.