Home › Books › Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World
Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World
by
64/99
Critics' Rating Index
78/99
Readers' Rating Index
86/99
Scholars' Citation Index
92/99
Volume of Reviews
30/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
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
"Bracingly candid about the superiority of Wordsworth's early output to his later work ..."
"Bate is a supremely capable guide, steeped in the poet's work and milieu ..."
"But with a charming forthrightness rare in academic biographers (he's an Oxford don), he goes a step further ..."
"Coleridge brightens every page he bounces on to ..."
"Yet while this makes Radical Wordsworth episodic, it is never superficial."
"I'm not sure that Jonathan Bate's biography, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World, offers much that's new ..."
"And he has succeeded in writing it ..."
"Curiously, Radical Wordsworth is markedly unlike the book Bate describes in his preface."
"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 ..."
"This is a narrative that celebrates the fact that our lives are marked by turning points ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!