Wordsworth : a life
(Book)

Includes index.

Orphaned and dependent on the charity of unsympathetic relatives, Wordsworth became the archetypal teenage rebel. He went to Revolutionary France, where he fathered an illegitimate daughter and became a committed republican. His poetry was as revolutionary as his politics, challenging convention in form, style, and subject, and earning him the contempt of critics. Only the encouragement of a group of supporters, above all Coleridge, kept him true to his poetic vocation. In the half-century that followed, his reputation was transformed. His advocacy of imagination and feeling touched a chord in an increasingly industrial, mechanistic age, and his influence was profoundly felt in every sphere of life. In the last decade of his life, his home became a place of pilgrimage for people who came to pay their respects to his genius. His legacy, as a poet and as the spiritual founder of the conservation movement, remains with us today.--From publisher description.

BSLW RECAT 2023