The Life of William Wordsworth
A Critical Biography
Wiley Blackwell Critical Biographies Series

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Language: English

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504 p. · 16x23.9 cm · Hardback

By examining the family and financial circumstances of Wordsworth?s early years, this illuminating biography reshapes our understanding of the great Romantic poet?s most creative period of life and writing.

 

  • Features new research into Wordsworth?s financial situation, and into how the poet and his family survived financially
  • Offers a new understanding of the role of his great unwritten poem ?The Recluse?
  • Presents a new assessment of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments x

Abbreviations and Texts xii

Foreword: “The Prelude”: A Poem of My Own Life? xvii

Part I Early Years 1

1 Versions of Home: 1770–83 3

2 Hawkshead and Esthwaite: 1783–7 18

3 Cambridge: 1787–90 37

4 To the Alps: and What Followed: 1790–1 53

5 Annette Vallon, Michel de Beaupuy, and the Bishop of Llandaff: 1791–3 69

Part II Writer 91

6 Salisbury Plain and its Consequences: 1793–5 93

7 Racedown: 1795–7 113

8 Coleridge and Alfoxton: 1797–8 135

9 Lyrical Ballads: 1798 157

10 Hamburg to the Harz: 1798 173

11 Writing in Goslar: 1798–9 183

12 Sockburn to Grasmere: 1799–1800 198

Part III Town-End 213

13 “Home at Grasmere,” the “Ode,” “Michael”: 1800–1 215

14 Hurting: 1800–1 241

15 Marrying: 1801–2 249

16 Grasmere to Calais and on to Gallow Hill: 1802 265

17 Marriage, First Child, and the Trip to Scotland: 1802–3 284

18 “The Prelude” I: 1804 303

19 “The Prelude” II: 1804–5 315

20 “Elegiac Stanzas,” Poems, in Two Volumes: 1806–7 328

Part IV The Light of Common Day 341

21 “The Recluse” and The Convention of Cintra: 1808–9 343

22 Loss and Grief: 1809–12 356

23 Stamp-officer and Poet of The Excursion: 1812–14 368

24 “What though it be past”: 1814 387

Part V Sketches of Late Years 397

25 Poetry, Family, and Polemic: 1815–18 399

26 Peter Bell and “the ghosts of what they were”: 1819–26 407

27 “The Recluse” and “The Prelude”: 1827–33 418

28 The Past Enshrined: 1834–42 429

29 No Resting Place: 1843–50 439

Afterword 447

Bibliography 451

Index 457

JOHN WORTHEN is Emeritus Professor, University of Nottingham, UK. His books include The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2010), Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician (2007), D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (2005), The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths in 1802 (2001), and D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912 (1991).