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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 is not particularly short and packs in a lot of erudition ..."
"Bate sees the 1805 version of The Prelude, as I do, as the zenith of Wordsworth's art."
"This is Wordsworth the dreamy, serious radical glimpsed flying across frozen lakes on his skates, or marvelling at revolutionary Paris, or falling in love ..."
"Radical Wordsworth...deserves to take its place as the finest modern introduction to his work, life and impact ..."
"This is a narrative that celebrates the fact that our lives are marked by turning points ..."
"Bracingly candid about the superiority of Wordsworth's early output to his later work ..."
"after the first few chapters Bate's commentary is a pretty tepid affair ..."
"Yet while this makes Radical Wordsworth episodic, it is never superficial."
"excellent and enjoyable ..."
"Reams have been written on the Wordsworths' familial relations and there is no doubt that the bond between Dorothy and William was a complicated one."
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