Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World

by Jonathan Bate

Overview

On the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth comes an “appealing new biography . . . [that] illuminates Wordsworth’s poetic originality.” (Brad Leithauser, Wall Street Journal)

“The finest modern introduction to [Wordsworth's] work, life and impact. It shows how and why ‘Wordsworth made a difference.'”—Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times

Named a Favorite Book of 2020 by The Progressive

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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300169645
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	05/19/2020
Pages:	608
Sales rank:	313,205
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Sir Jonathan Bate is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University and a senior research fellow at Oxford University, where he was formerly provost of Worcester College.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Preface xv

Prelude

1 The Epoch 3

Part 1 1770-1806: Bliss was it in That Dawn to be Alive

2 A Voice that Flowed Along my Dreams 17

3 Fostered 26

4 There was a Boy 39

5 Walking into Revolution 62

6 Two Revolutionary Women 89

7 But to be Young was Very Heaven 101

8 Stepping Westward 120

9 A New Spirit in Poetry 147

10 The Banks of the Wye 176

11 The Experiment 187

12 Lucy in the Harz with Dorothy 208

13 By W Wordsworth 230

14 Home at Grasmere 256

15 The Child is Father of the Man 279

Excursion

16 From New School to Lake School 313

Part 2 1807-1850: Wordsworth's Healing Power

17 Surprised by Grief 345

18 This will never do 370

19 Among the Cockneys 391

20 The Lost Leader 416

21 A Medicine for my State of Mind 439

Retrospect

22 A Sort of National Property 459

23 Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind 475

Chronology 493

Suggestions for Further Reading 499

Acknowledgments 505

Notes 511

Index 563

Editorial Reviews

03/16/2020

In this energetic literary biography, Bate (Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination), a senior research fellow at Oxford University, places William Wordsworth’s work in the context of his life. Bracingly candid about the superiority of Wordsworth’s early output to his later work (“I asked myself how could a poet who could be so good could also be so bad”), Bate makes a strong case that, when Wordsworth was good, he was transformative. Bate focuses on the poet’s early years: his troubled childhood, his devotion to—and then retreat from—French Revolution-era radicalism, and his passionate embrace of nature in lieu of politics. In Bate’s telling, Wordsworth’s relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who spurred him to great heights early on before falling out with him, is key to understanding Wordsworth’s uneven body of work. Bate spends less time on Wordsworth’s old age, when he became more conservative politically, less inspired, and, in the eyes of younger poets like Percy Shelley and John Keats, more fallible. Nonetheless, his “radical alternative religion of nature” cleared a path for later poets and philosophers, including the American transcendentalists. Appealingly conveying his own love of and frustrations with Wordsworth, Bate demonstrates in his delightful volume how, flaws and all, the poet “made a difference” in the way future generations would think and feel. (May)

Publishers Weekly

A bold and bracing account, masterful with its material, patiently brilliant in reading the poems, and gloriously convincing about its subject’s social significance . . .  a finely authoritative reading, rather than simple record, of Wordsworth’s life . . .  the distillation of a lifetime’s expertise by a leading scholar and biographer.—Daily Telegraph

“Radical Wordsworth . . . is guided by enthusiasm. It is all the better for it. This excellent, intellectually rousing book is about the young poet. This is Wordsworth the dreamy, serious radical glimpsed flying across frozen lakes on his skates, or marvelling at revolutionary Paris, or falling in love with the beautiful Annette Vallon in France. This is the Wordsworth who was the ‘pure emanation of the spirit of his age’, who pitied the poor, loved the natural world and believed ‘all that we behold is full of blessings.’”—The Times

“This new book, like everything Bate writes, richly repays reading, and bears comparison with his pioneering life of Ted Hughes.”—John Carey, Sunday Times

“[A] marvelous new biography of Wordsworth . . . that celebrates the fact that our lives are marked by turning points, not routine. . . . [An] inspiring, fleet-footed book.”—The Guardian

“Bate is a supremely capable guide, steeped in the poet’s work and milieu . . . Radical Wordsworth—‘radical’ not just in his youthful politics but in his poetry’s return to the roots of selfhood and society—deserves to take its place as the finest modern introduction to his work, life and impact. It shows how and why ‘Wordsworth made a difference’ . . . Bate delivers not a long-distance trudge of the kind the poet loved . . . but a collage of crisply written, intensively researched scenes . . . That approach suits a writer who argued that pivotal ‘spots of time’, fixed in memory, can order our past and heal our present.”—Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times

“[An] appealing new biography. . . . Mr. Bate’s radical focus is less political than literary. He illuminates Wordsworth’s poetic originality . . . [and] clarifies some of the ways—multifarious, incongruous—in which Wordsworth marshals various voices to forge the complex tone of ‘The Prelude.’”—Brad Leithauser, Wall Street Journal

“In this energetic literary biography . . . Bate . . . makes a strong case that, when Wordsworth was good, he was transformative. . . . Appealingly conveying his own love of and frustrations with Wordsworth, Bate demonstrates in his delightful volume how, flaws and all, the poet ‘made a difference’ in the way future generations would think and feel.”—Publishers Weekly

“[Radical Wordsworth] breathes with exactly the kind of relaxed authority that’s always made [Bate’s] books a joy to read.”—Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review
 

"[W]hat critics would call Wordsworth's 'great decade' (1798–1808), when Wordsworth wrote his best poems . . . Bate discusses incisively."—Choice

"A captivating read. Jonathan Bate has produced a life of the longest living major Romantic poet foreshortened through those 'spots of time' that left their most enduring impact on his mind."—Denise Gigante, Stanford University

"Jonathan Bate brings to Wordsworth's poetry a great fund of local knowledge and a sympathy both personal and profound. This remarkable biography encompasses a life story and a subtle critical commentary, but it is also an invitation to think and act in defense of the natural world, 'the place where in the end / We find our happiness, or not at all.'"—David Bromwich, author of The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke

"Wordsworth did indeed change the world, and Jonathan Bate superbly explains not only how the poet achieved that, but also why the change is for the better. This book has something for both those who know Wordsworth a little, and a lot."—James Engell, Harvard University

“This critical biography fills a long-felt need and does it superbly, making a convincing case for the great poet’s originality and imaginative power. Skillfully interweaving perceptive criticism with biographical contexts, Jonathan Bate shows in depth how Wordsworth created a new poetry based in the language of ordinary life.”—Leo Damrosch, author of The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age

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