Front cover image for Wordsworth : a life

Wordsworth : a life

Orphaned and dependent on the charity of unsympathetic relatives, Wordsworth became the archetypal teenage rebel. He went 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 contempt of critics. Only the encouragement of a group of supporters, above all Coleridge, kept him true to his poetic vocation. In the half-century that followed, his reputation was transformed. His advocacy of imagination and feeling touched a chord in an increasingly industrial, mechanistic age, and his influence was profoundly felt in every sphere of life. In the last decade of his life, his home became a place of pilgrimage for people who came to pay their respects to his genius. His legacy, as a poet and as the spiritual founder of the conservation movement, remains with us today.--From publisher description
Print Book, English, 2006
1st American ed View all formats and editions
HarperCollins, New York, 2006
Biographies
xviii, 548 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : facsimiles, illustrations, portraits ; 23 cm
9780060787363, 9780060787318, 0060787368, 0060787317
608160536
The child is father of the man pre; 1770-83
A poor, devoted crew; 1784-7
Squandered abroad; 1787-90
A vital interest; 1799-92
A patriot of the world; 1793-4
Benighted heart and mind; 1794-6
A sett of violent democrats; 1796-8
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! ; 1809-11
Suffer the little children; 1811-12
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; 1893-42
Poet Laureate; 1842-5
Fixed and irremovable grief; 1845-7
Bowed to the dust; 1847-50
Epilogue; 1847-50
Includes index