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Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World
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About This Book
On the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth's birth comes a highly imaginative and vivid portrait of a revolutionary poet who embodied the spirit of his age Published in time for the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth's birth, this is the biography of a great poetic genius, a revolutionary who changed the world. Wordsworth rejoiced in the French Revolution and played a central role in the cultural upheaval that we call the Romantic Revolution. He and his fellow Romantics changed forever the way we think about childhood, the sense of the self, our connection to the natural environment, and the purpose of poetry. But his was also a revolutionary life in the old sense of the word, insofar as his art was of memory, the return of the past, the circling back to childhood and youth. This beautifully written biography is purposefully fragmentary, momentary, and selective, opening up what Wordsworth called "the hiding-places of my power."
Reviews
"it would be hard to think of a better poet to read just now, when our abuse of natural systems has brought us to this moment of terrible reckoning."
"[Bate] displays his deep knowledge of the sources ..."
"Bate delivers not a long-distance trudge of the kind the poet loved (Thomas De Quincey, his disciple, worked out that Wordsworth's rambles covered 175,000 miles) but a collage of crisply written, intensively researched scenes, 'fragmentary, momentary, selective.'"
"In fact, it is far from dull."
"It might have been a bag of pasta, so greedily did I fall on it."
"reading Bate's book alongside Stephen Gill's newly revised William Wordsworth: A Life, I felt much more excited by the latter."
"Bracingly candid about the superiority of Wordsworth's early output to his later work ..."
"And the book's subtitle—'The Poet Who Changed the World'—feels unearned; there's no adequate discussion of Wordsworth's ramifying influence down the ages."
"If we accept that he wrote a large amount of ordinary poetry we should also acknowledge that his best work repay close and frequent reading ..."
"The radicalism most interesting to modern readers is Wordsworth's pioneering exploration of the self—Bate makes repeated comparisons to Freud."
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