Wordsworth : a life
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Wordsworth : a life
Viking, 2000
Available at 10 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [939]-944) and indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
William Wordsworth's early life reads like a novel. Orphaned at a young age and dependent on the charity of unsympathetic relatives, he became the archetypal teenage rebel. Refusing to enter the Church, he went instead to Revolutionary France, where he fathered an illegitimate daughter and became a committed Republican. His poetry was as revolutionary as his politics, challenging convention in form, style and subject and earning him the universal derision and contempt of critics. Only the unfailing encouragement of a tightly knit group of supporters, his family and, above all, Coleridge, kept him true to his poetic vocation. In the half-century that followed his reputation was transformed - the despised author of homely lyric verse turned into a venerated philosopher whose opinions were actively sought by politicians, Church leaders and educationalists. His advocavy of the importance of imagination and feeling touched a chord in an increasingly industral, mechanistic age, and his influence was profoundly and widely felt in every sphere of life.
In the last decade of his life, Rydal Mount, his home in the Lakes for 37 years, became a place of pilgrimage, not just for the great and powerful in Church and state, but also, more touchingly, for the hundreds of ordinary people who came to pay their respects to his genius. In what is, astonishingly, the first biography of Wordsworth to treat the latter part of his life as fully as the first, Juliet Barker employs the skills that made "The Brontes" a bestseller. Balancing meticulous research with a readable style, and srupulous objectivity with an understanding of her subject, she reveals not only the public figure who was courted and reviled in equal measure but also the complex, elusive, private man behind that image. Drawing on unpublished sources, she vividly re-creates the intimacy of Wordsworth's domestic circle, showing the love, laughter, loyalty and tragedies which bound them together. Far from being the remote, cold, solitary figure of legend, Wordsworth emerges from his biography as a passionate, vibrant man who lived for his family, his poetry and his beloved Lakeland.
His legacy, as a poet and as the spiritual founder of the conservation movement, remains with us today.
Table of Contents
- The child is father of the man, pre-1770-83
- a poor, devoted crew, 1784-7
- squandered abroad, 1787-90
- a vital interest, 1790-92
- a patriot of the world, 1793-4
- benighted heart and mind, 1794-6
- a sett of violent democrats, 1796-9
- the giant Wordsworth, 1798-9
- the concern, 1799-1800
- home at Grasmere, 1800-1802
- the set is broken, 1802-5
- acquiring the quiet mind, 1805-6
- the convention of Cintra, 1807-9
- the blessedest of men! 1 809-11
- suffer the little children, 181-12
- the excursion, 1813-14
- increasing influence, 1814-16
- Bombastes Furioso, 1817-20
- a tour of the continent, 1820-22
- Idle Mount, 1823-6
- shades of the prison-house, 1826-9
- furiously alarmist, 1829-33
- falling leaves, 1833-6
- coming home, 1836-9
- real greatness, 1939-42
- Poet Laureate, 1842-5
- fixed and irremovable grief, 1845-7
- bowed to the dust, 1847-50. Epilogue -1850-59. Abbreviations of names used in notes
- abbreviations of sources used in notes.
by "Nielsen BookData"