A Life in Letters (Penguin Classics)

by WilliamWordsworth (Author), William Wordsworth (Author), Juliet Barker (Editor)

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $4.44

  William Wordsworth is usually remembered as the quintessential Victorian Poet Laureate: a dull, worthy, establishment figure, with impeccable middle class, Tory, Anglican credentials, whose moralistic poetry has been required reading for generations of yawning school children. Yet there is so much more to Wordsworth than Daffodils and The Prelude.

  This selection of letters and autobiographical fragments introduces us to the real Wordsworth: the rebellious schoolboy, who vandalised his family portraits, became a supporter of the French Revolution and fathered an illegitimate daughter in France; the radical poet whose flouting of the conventions of the day attracted the ridicule of the reviewers and forced him to endure thirty years of rejection, obscurity and financial hardship before achieving belated critical and popular success; the devoted brother, husband and father who could still write passionate love letters to his wife after ten years of marriage and the birth of five children; and, finally, the revered patriarch whose poetry formed the hearts and minds of a generation, whose opinions were sought by writers, politicians, churchmen and educationalists throughout the English speaking world, but who thought nothing of vaulting walls, skating on the Lakes or climbing Helvellyn even in his seventies.

• Used

  Paperback
  2001

  $3.45

  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 advocacy of the importance of imagination and feeling touched a chord in an increasingly industrial, 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 scrupulous 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.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $4.68

  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.