Wordsworth

by Juliet Barker

First published 2000

Amazon

3.9(27)

Juliet Barker traces William Wordsworth from an unsettled Cumbrian childhood through Cambridge, Revolutionary France and the radical years in which he began to reshape English poetry. She follows his relationship with Annette Vallon and their daughter, his intense bond with his sister Dorothy, and the creative partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge that produced Lyrical Ballads. The landscapes of the Lake District remain central as Wordsworth develops the ideas about memory, nature and imagination that define his work.

The biography gives equal weight to the long second half of Wordsworth’s life, when family responsibilities, political change, bereavement and growing public recognition altered both the man and his reputation. Once mocked as an experimental radical, he became a national figure and eventually Poet Laureate. Barker draws on family correspondence, diaries and unpublished material to portray a poet whose private affections and domestic life were far warmer and more complicated than the austere public image inherited by later generations.