Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World

"The radicalism most interesting to modern readers is Wordsworth's pioneering exploration of the self—Bate makes repeated comparisons to Freud."

"Bracingly candid about the superiority of Wordsworth's early output to his later work ..."

"not a complete biography but takes its cue from Wordsworth's own understanding of himself to concentrate on the 'spots of time' that produced his great work."

"Bate is a supremely capable guide, steeped in the poet's work and milieu ..."

"Bate is excellent on how Wordsworth forged a blank verse that shed its grand Miltonic subject matter while taking advantage of the form's capacity for suppleness and intimacy ..."

"He carefully and persuasively re-examines the effects of the revolution on Wordsworth ..."

"In his marvellous new biography of Wordsworth, it's as if Jonathan Bate has inhaled the very air these two young men [Wordsworth and Coleridge] breathed; there is a giddiness here—a passionate enthusiasm—that's all too rare in books about poets, particularly those who, having failed to die young, grew stodgy in later life ..."

"It is full of sharp anecdotes that evoke the lives of the Wordsworths—including the time that William found himself threatened with a carving knife by an inebriated priest."