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Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World
A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020 ‘Radical Wordsworth deserves to take its place as the finest modern introduction to his work, life and impact’ Financial Times ‘Richly repays reading … It is hard to think of another poet who has changed our world so much’ Sunday Times A dazzling new biography of Wordsworth’s radical life as a thinker and poetical innovator, published to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth. William Wordsworth wrote the first great poetic autobiography. We owe to him the idea that places of outstanding natural beauty should become what he called ‘a sort of national property’. He changed forever the way we think about childhood, about the sense of the self, about our connection to the natural environment, and about the purpose of poetry. He was born among the mountains of the English Lake District. He walked into the French Revolution, had a love affair and an illegitimate child, before witnessing horrific violence in Paris. His friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at the core of the Romantic movement. As he retreated from radical politics and into an imaginative world within, his influence would endure as he shaped the ideas of thinkers, writers and activists throughout the nineteenth century in both Britain and the United States. This wonderful book opens what Wordsworth called ‘the hiding places of my power’. W. H. Auden once wrote that ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’. He was wrong. Wordsworth’s poetry changed the world. Award-winning biographer and critic Jonathan Bate tells the story of how it happened.
608 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2020
103 people are currently reading
682 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Bate
118 books130 followersJonathan Bate CBE FBA FRSL is an English academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar of Shakespeare, Romanticism and Ecocriticism. He is also Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Provost of Worcester College, Oxford. A Man Booker Prize judge in 2014.
He studied at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. He has been King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick. He is married to author and biographer Paula Byrne. He has also written one novel, The Cure for Love.
He studied at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. He has been King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick. He is married to author and biographer Paula Byrne. He has also written one novel, The Cure for Love.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
June 6, 2020
For a few days of the sunny May lockdown sitting in my garden I was totally engrossed in Jonathan Bate’s new biography of William Wordsworth. I did however take timeout to watch Jonathan talk about the book at the Hay Festival Digital.
In spite of regarding the Lake District as my spiritual home and having visited Grasmere, Dove Cottage, Rydal Mount and Hawkshead many times and even staying at Greta Hall home of Southey and Coleridge until reading Jonathan Bates’ book I don’t think I ever fully understood Wordsworth’s poetry.
Radical Wordsworth has lifted a cloak from eyes an enabled me to see the greatness of Wordsworth’s enduring achievements. The book begins in Cockermouth the place of little William’s birth and takes us through the events of his formative years including the death of his parents the separation from his siblings, including beloved sister Dorothy and his move to Hawkshead where he was fortunate to receive an excellent education enabling him to go up to Cambridge.
Wordsworth was fortunate to come from a lower middle-class background and to have several wealthy benefactors. After graduating he was able to take a walking tour in Europe including to the Alps. He was also able to return to France at the time of the revolution and to have fallen in love with Annette a young French woman who bore him a child.
On return from France Wordsworth spent time in different parts of Britain including the Wye Valley North Wales and Scotland before eventually settling in his beloved Grasmere. In the book Bates beautifully describes all these experiences and the effect on Wordsworth’s development as a poet.
Bates also devotes many pages to describing the importance of Wordsworth’s family and friends to his work, especially the close collaboration with Coleridge on the Lyrical Ballads and other poems and with his devoted sister Dorothy.
Bates puts his finger on the original creative spirit of Wordsworth’s poetry which made it truly radical namely the intensely personal recollection of childhood experience and response to nature linked to a wider philosophical narrative that appreciates and values the natural world and is sympathetic to the common man.
In the book Bates does not shy away from agreeing with critics and romantic poets, such as Byron, Keats and Shelley who thought that in his later years spent comfortably at Rydal Mount much of Wordsworth’s poetry was turgid and second rate. However, throughout his life Wordsworth worked on a ground-breaking autobiographical epic poem, published after his death which came to be known as The Prelude, which Bates regards as masterpiece describing the development of the mind of the poet.
Wordsworth changed the way people see the world. Before Wordsworth people just thought mountains were dangerous forbidding places and that common people were not worth considering. Wordsworth changed all that and, in his poetry, and other writings he inspired the formation of the National Trust, the National Parks in Britain and the USA and gave us the idea of sustainable development.
Wordsworth was truly Radical. A massive thank you to Jonathan Bate for enabling me to appreciate what a great man Wordsworth was, and I shall now take Jonathan up on his further reading suggestions at the back of his fabulous biography.
In spite of regarding the Lake District as my spiritual home and having visited Grasmere, Dove Cottage, Rydal Mount and Hawkshead many times and even staying at Greta Hall home of Southey and Coleridge until reading Jonathan Bates’ book I don’t think I ever fully understood Wordsworth’s poetry.
Radical Wordsworth has lifted a cloak from eyes an enabled me to see the greatness of Wordsworth’s enduring achievements. The book begins in Cockermouth the place of little William’s birth and takes us through the events of his formative years including the death of his parents the separation from his siblings, including beloved sister Dorothy and his move to Hawkshead where he was fortunate to receive an excellent education enabling him to go up to Cambridge.
Wordsworth was fortunate to come from a lower middle-class background and to have several wealthy benefactors. After graduating he was able to take a walking tour in Europe including to the Alps. He was also able to return to France at the time of the revolution and to have fallen in love with Annette a young French woman who bore him a child.
On return from France Wordsworth spent time in different parts of Britain including the Wye Valley North Wales and Scotland before eventually settling in his beloved Grasmere. In the book Bates beautifully describes all these experiences and the effect on Wordsworth’s development as a poet.
Bates also devotes many pages to describing the importance of Wordsworth’s family and friends to his work, especially the close collaboration with Coleridge on the Lyrical Ballads and other poems and with his devoted sister Dorothy.
Bates puts his finger on the original creative spirit of Wordsworth’s poetry which made it truly radical namely the intensely personal recollection of childhood experience and response to nature linked to a wider philosophical narrative that appreciates and values the natural world and is sympathetic to the common man.
In the book Bates does not shy away from agreeing with critics and romantic poets, such as Byron, Keats and Shelley who thought that in his later years spent comfortably at Rydal Mount much of Wordsworth’s poetry was turgid and second rate. However, throughout his life Wordsworth worked on a ground-breaking autobiographical epic poem, published after his death which came to be known as The Prelude, which Bates regards as masterpiece describing the development of the mind of the poet.
Wordsworth changed the way people see the world. Before Wordsworth people just thought mountains were dangerous forbidding places and that common people were not worth considering. Wordsworth changed all that and, in his poetry, and other writings he inspired the formation of the National Trust, the National Parks in Britain and the USA and gave us the idea of sustainable development.
Wordsworth was truly Radical. A massive thank you to Jonathan Bate for enabling me to appreciate what a great man Wordsworth was, and I shall now take Jonathan up on his further reading suggestions at the back of his fabulous biography.
May 8, 2020
It was good to be taken back to ‘The Prelude’ and the Lake District. It brought back memories of all those weekends I spent wandering through the Lakes in my teens and twenties. It was also good to be reminded of Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, which drew out my own spots of time – those brief moments of awareness, of peace, of understanding. Despite those things, I didn’t find ‘Radical Wordsworth’ all that satisfying - the radical bit came over as a little forced, there were too many depths not explored, and although I appreciated the support for his art in later life, I never felt enthused with the project. The writing was lively, and the fact it started in res media helped to make it a comfortable read throughout. One just for Wordsworth lovers, maybe.
September 9, 2021
”He was always a mountaineer, so perhaps the conquest of some vast peak is the best metaphor for his life story. Imagine it as thirty-six years of arduous but exhilarating ascent to the summit that was reached with the completion and reading aloud of the epic work that he called his ‘Poem to Coleridge’ and that his family would publish as The Prelude. After a moment of rest, there would be forty-four years of crawling descent.”
Reputation – 3/5
Jonathan Bate is an English academic who has written several books about Shakespeare and the Romantic literary tradition. His videos are on youtube, and he is evidently quite popular in a “the BBC presents…” sort of way. This biography of Wordsworth was my first encounter with him.
Point – 2/5
Released in 2020 for the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, this book has in common much of the overblown quality of elegy that used to be present in lame poetry and speeches on the anniversaries of great men in previous centuries. The way they did it back in the 1850s was that some rhetorician would stand in front of a crowd and talk for hours about why we should remember some great artist, how he made us who we are. The crowd of laborers who just showed up because there was little else to do on a Sunday afternoon would drift into daydream as some learned professor gave a tedious, overlong speech that was much more important to him than to anyone else present. Of these old orations, mercifully little survives. In our own day the material for these occasions is printed by the thousands in very long, equally dull books with dozens of pages of citations.
About 1/5th of this 500-page book works as a proper biography. The rest of it suffers as a disorganized blend of university lecture, literary criticism, and history of ideas. Altogether lacking in focus, the feel is that the author was constantly trying to justify the title of the book. He is overbearing on the idea that Wordsworth was “radical,” and goes to great and wholly uninteresting lengths to describe how Wordsworth “changed the world.”
In this, Wordsworth becomes a mouthpiece for the author’s opinions: English liberty, conservationism, the continuity of the literary tradition from Shakespeare to the Romantics, etc. Jonathan Bate is not alone in this fallacy, it is very common among biographers. When it is done to exceptional effect, it can be forgiven, even praised. "Exceptional," however, is not a word that you could use to describe the author’s effect in any aspect of this book. It is average through and through.
There are a lot of problems with writing a biography of Wordsworth. First, he lived during a time when the world was looking for Great Men. All the old was thrown out and a new canon was in the process of establishing itself. Critics were looking for the next generation of great visionaries of the age, and so Wordsworth was more or less automatically anointed, along with plenty of lesser poets who we’ve rightfully forgotten. Wordsworth rose to the top and remained there on merit. In the one really good chapter of history of ideas writing, Bate gives a round-up of Romanticism, and how Wordsworth earned his place as the successor to Shakespeare and Milton by embodying the “Spirit of the Age.” For anyone who is unfamiliar with Romanticism generally, this chapter will explain it all. And even if it’s all familiar to you, the generalization and organization is well done.
The second problem with Wordsworth biographies is that Wordsworth lived an objectively dull life. The irony of this biography is that the 1/5th of this book that I found really worked as such was the start of the “descent” of Wordsworth’s life. There is a wealth of interesting biographical information in this section of the book, and for the first time (about 300 pages in) we begin to get the feeling that we are meeting Wordsworth, the man.
That leads me to the third major problem with Wordsworth biographies: we don't need modern biographies to meet Wordsworth, the man. He wrote his autobiography in verse for us in The Prelude and his life and work was described in detail by his contemporaries. Writers of much great greater skill and deeper thought than any academic today were personal friends or enemies of Wordsworth, and all of them, without exception, recognized his universal importance. If you’re interested in Wordsworth, you might as well just read first-hand accounts of him. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, and Wordsworth’s own sister Dorothy all wrote about the great poet; their accounts likely add up to the length of this modern biography, and they will tell you infinitely more about Wordsworth, and in a much finer style.
Recommendation – 3/5
But if you’re someone who just loves to read biography and all that 19th Century prose is daunting for you, then this is probably the book you should pick up at the airport. Just be warned that it comes with an unhelpful serving of how Wordsworth “changed the world” in the form of 150 or so pages, with another 200 pages of commonplace what-was-Wordsworth-thinking-when-he-wrote-these-lines kind of analysis.
Personal – 2/5
This book was not hard to read and not boring in any offensive way. It was totally average with one major flaw: very early on it made me realize that everything worth reading about Wordsworth was written while he was still alive. So, I read at least 2/3rds of this book mechanically trying to finish it, knowing that reading it was a waste of time that would be better spent reading De Quincey or Dorothy Wordsworth. A book is a real success when it inspires “further reading.” But if, on nearly every page, it inspires you to stop reading and pick up a better source, we can say that it inspires “replacement reading,” and that is a sure mark of a book that never need have been written.
P.S. - What I actually learned from this book
Wordsworth stood 5’9 ⅞” inches. That was quite tall by the day’s standards. Thomas De Quincey was only 5’0” by comparison.
Wordsworth probably didn’t have sex for at least a decade between 1792 and his marriage to Mary Hutchinson in 1802.
Wordsworth hated the Ossian poems. He gets some credit in my eyes for that judgement.
A few good rips on Wordsworth that I had forgotten. The highlight is Byron calling him “Turdsworth.”
Reputation – 3/5
Jonathan Bate is an English academic who has written several books about Shakespeare and the Romantic literary tradition. His videos are on youtube, and he is evidently quite popular in a “the BBC presents…” sort of way. This biography of Wordsworth was my first encounter with him.
Point – 2/5
Released in 2020 for the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth, this book has in common much of the overblown quality of elegy that used to be present in lame poetry and speeches on the anniversaries of great men in previous centuries. The way they did it back in the 1850s was that some rhetorician would stand in front of a crowd and talk for hours about why we should remember some great artist, how he made us who we are. The crowd of laborers who just showed up because there was little else to do on a Sunday afternoon would drift into daydream as some learned professor gave a tedious, overlong speech that was much more important to him than to anyone else present. Of these old orations, mercifully little survives. In our own day the material for these occasions is printed by the thousands in very long, equally dull books with dozens of pages of citations.
About 1/5th of this 500-page book works as a proper biography. The rest of it suffers as a disorganized blend of university lecture, literary criticism, and history of ideas. Altogether lacking in focus, the feel is that the author was constantly trying to justify the title of the book. He is overbearing on the idea that Wordsworth was “radical,” and goes to great and wholly uninteresting lengths to describe how Wordsworth “changed the world.”
In this, Wordsworth becomes a mouthpiece for the author’s opinions: English liberty, conservationism, the continuity of the literary tradition from Shakespeare to the Romantics, etc. Jonathan Bate is not alone in this fallacy, it is very common among biographers. When it is done to exceptional effect, it can be forgiven, even praised. "Exceptional," however, is not a word that you could use to describe the author’s effect in any aspect of this book. It is average through and through.
There are a lot of problems with writing a biography of Wordsworth. First, he lived during a time when the world was looking for Great Men. All the old was thrown out and a new canon was in the process of establishing itself. Critics were looking for the next generation of great visionaries of the age, and so Wordsworth was more or less automatically anointed, along with plenty of lesser poets who we’ve rightfully forgotten. Wordsworth rose to the top and remained there on merit. In the one really good chapter of history of ideas writing, Bate gives a round-up of Romanticism, and how Wordsworth earned his place as the successor to Shakespeare and Milton by embodying the “Spirit of the Age.” For anyone who is unfamiliar with Romanticism generally, this chapter will explain it all. And even if it’s all familiar to you, the generalization and organization is well done.
The second problem with Wordsworth biographies is that Wordsworth lived an objectively dull life. The irony of this biography is that the 1/5th of this book that I found really worked as such was the start of the “descent” of Wordsworth’s life. There is a wealth of interesting biographical information in this section of the book, and for the first time (about 300 pages in) we begin to get the feeling that we are meeting Wordsworth, the man.
That leads me to the third major problem with Wordsworth biographies: we don't need modern biographies to meet Wordsworth, the man. He wrote his autobiography in verse for us in The Prelude and his life and work was described in detail by his contemporaries. Writers of much great greater skill and deeper thought than any academic today were personal friends or enemies of Wordsworth, and all of them, without exception, recognized his universal importance. If you’re interested in Wordsworth, you might as well just read first-hand accounts of him. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, and Wordsworth’s own sister Dorothy all wrote about the great poet; their accounts likely add up to the length of this modern biography, and they will tell you infinitely more about Wordsworth, and in a much finer style.
Recommendation – 3/5
But if you’re someone who just loves to read biography and all that 19th Century prose is daunting for you, then this is probably the book you should pick up at the airport. Just be warned that it comes with an unhelpful serving of how Wordsworth “changed the world” in the form of 150 or so pages, with another 200 pages of commonplace what-was-Wordsworth-thinking-when-he-wrote-these-lines kind of analysis.
Personal – 2/5
This book was not hard to read and not boring in any offensive way. It was totally average with one major flaw: very early on it made me realize that everything worth reading about Wordsworth was written while he was still alive. So, I read at least 2/3rds of this book mechanically trying to finish it, knowing that reading it was a waste of time that would be better spent reading De Quincey or Dorothy Wordsworth. A book is a real success when it inspires “further reading.” But if, on nearly every page, it inspires you to stop reading and pick up a better source, we can say that it inspires “replacement reading,” and that is a sure mark of a book that never need have been written.
P.S. - What I actually learned from this book
Wordsworth stood 5’9 ⅞” inches. That was quite tall by the day’s standards. Thomas De Quincey was only 5’0” by comparison.
Wordsworth probably didn’t have sex for at least a decade between 1792 and his marriage to Mary Hutchinson in 1802.
Wordsworth hated the Ossian poems. He gets some credit in my eyes for that judgement.
A few good rips on Wordsworth that I had forgotten. The highlight is Byron calling him “Turdsworth.”
April 5, 2021
Read for the BooktubePrize / Nonfiction Octofinals
Wordsworth-fans (which I'm not) might love this, but I found it rather boring.
2.5*
Wordsworth-fans (which I'm not) might love this, but I found it rather boring.
2.5*
August 13, 2020
Jonathan Bate’s biography of Wordsworth does exactly what it says on the cover - it makes a very strong case for Wordsworth as a radical poet and philosopher, but goes one step further and sees him as a huge influence on modern environmental movements and the setting up of institutions like the National Trust and National Parks. Of course, he does this by concentrating on the first (radical) half of Wordsworth’s life and, as far as possible, ignoring the last 40 years, although he’s up front about doing that.
But the book is as much an analysis of the poetry (especially The Prelude) as it is a standard account of his life. Nevertheless, Bate examines very closely Wordsworth’s complex relationship with Coleridge and shows how important it was to his development as a romantic poet.
But the book is as much an analysis of the poetry (especially The Prelude) as it is a standard account of his life. Nevertheless, Bate examines very closely Wordsworth’s complex relationship with Coleridge and shows how important it was to his development as a romantic poet.
October 28, 2021
Single-handedly made me interested in the Romantics again, which is no small feat; this is nicely written, engaging, and will fill you with nostalgia for the kind of life you never led and would never want to lead. Bate does a bit too much reading life and poetry into each other for my taste, but that really is just a question of taste. Also, beautiful layout and design, kudos to Yale UP for maybe stealing that from the British publisher.
April 9, 2024
4,5 stars; leave it to literary scholar extraordinaire and world renowned Shakespeare expert Bate to paint a vivid portrait of the rebel radical Wordsworth; thoroughly enjoyed the narrative, in particular Bate's bold move not to fall for the dull enumeration of facts in chronological order, but to compress the second half (40 years) of the rather boring part of Wordsworth life into one fourth the length of the book, leaving more room for the exciting first half to shine.
For a biographical deep-dive into the romantic movement be sure to read the magisterial works by Richard Holmes on Coleridge and Shelley, and Robin Mayhead and Andrew Motion Poet Laureate on Keats:
Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834
Shelley: The Pursuit
The Romantic Poets and Their Circle
John Keats
Keats
For a biographical deep-dive into the romantic movement be sure to read the magisterial works by Richard Holmes on Coleridge and Shelley, and Robin Mayhead and Andrew Motion Poet Laureate on Keats:
Coleridge: Early Visions, 1772-1804
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804-1834
Shelley: The Pursuit
The Romantic Poets and Their Circle
John Keats
Keats
July 23, 2024
Read this whilst travelling through the Lake District. Bate beautifully orients his reader towards the most exciting and enchanting aspects of Wordsworth’s life and poetry. It was especially thrilling to learn about Wordsworth’s influence on the beginnings of the National Trust, and how the Lakes (and its pilgrimages and associated environmentalism) came to be. Fantastic read.
September 7, 2020
An excellent biography and a learning experience. Wordsworth had a great impact on the way we look at and appreciate nature, and laid the groundwork for preserving and safeguarding the natural world on the only home we have.
April 1, 2021
An incredibly impressive, if perhaps slightly obtuse book! Despite some of Wordsworth’s relatable attributes, I don’t see this book appealing to readers outside of its own little niche. It’s too dense with facts and figures of a society (or more) that is no longer present.
Though, as a former English major, this book certainly awoke in me some remembrances of studying Romantic poetry (as well as correcting some inaccuracies that I picked up along the way. Why, in my head, did I equate Romantic poets to Classical poets, when the Classical poets were rationalists and the Romantics were, well, you know. :P I assume I must have oversimplified Keat’s poem, “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” heh.)
But to stay on topic here…this is a biography of one of the first Romantic poets, William Wordsworth! (Though it also dips a fair bit into philosophy and ponderings about individuals who are not Wordsworth.) Bate’s hinge on the word “radical,” as well as using a younger portrait of Wordsworth on the cover, vs the more staid old man portrait, is his claim to individuality. He posits that Wordsworth’s best work was written in the first half of his life, when he was more idealistic and less cynical. (The French Revolution that led to Napoleon rather than British-style democracy played a big part in the shift.)
In terms of Wordsworth’s actual life, beyond his stanzas and devotion to his home in the Lake County, we get a bit of a skeleton outline: a heady affair and a child out of wedlock in his youth, a later marriage that Bate found to be healthy due to passionate love letters and several children born, and his collaboration with his sister Dorothy and his friend/fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The two of them complimented each other’s works until they fell out of favor with each other, largely due to Coleridge’s drug addiction and obsession with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, so it seems.
So Wordsworth was the oldest (and also longest lived) Romantic poet. The “second generation” of poets like Shelley and Byron dismissed Wordsworth for too much focus on the self, and for selling out vis a vis government posts. Earlier contemporaries poo pooed at his “radicalness” for describing nature, the poor and spirituality that was not necessarily tied to religion. These are the types of focuses, Bate argued, that made Wordsworth into a visionary.
At one point Bate makes the startling pronouncement that perhaps Wordsworth should have died young, a la Shelley and Byron and Keats, so that his Genius would have never gone to seed. And yet…was it perhaps in the latter half of his life when he turned to what we might now call nature preservation? The epilogue of this book is given over to the myriad of ways that Wordsworth helped to shape the future, not just with poetry and spirituality, but with a focus on the environment.
It was a more optimistic note than I expected for the end of this book. Bate spent much of the beginning making asides that when editing his poetry in later decades, Wordsworth often muted or obfuscated the truth about his passions. I was prepared to meet a, perhaps hypocritical conservative who abandoned his earlier ideals because people (and revolutions, specifically) aren’t perfect. Instead, it seems he found new ways to fight for what he believed in, even if his poetry output took a little bit of a dive.
Kudos to Bate for copious primary source usage, especially given how much by way of letters and etc have been lost over the years. It’s part of the reason, I assume, that the biography comes off as a little more philosophical than personal. I also liked getting to learn about his sister, Dorothy, as well as other female poets who actually put themselves out there in public. Just a reminder, as the book shows us in multiple ways, that the past isn’t too different from the present. It may be over 200 years later, but we still strive for revolution, fulfilment and camaraderie. We still get disappointed when things go awry, and we still find solace in the small stuff. At least that’s my take.
Though, as a former English major, this book certainly awoke in me some remembrances of studying Romantic poetry (as well as correcting some inaccuracies that I picked up along the way. Why, in my head, did I equate Romantic poets to Classical poets, when the Classical poets were rationalists and the Romantics were, well, you know. :P I assume I must have oversimplified Keat’s poem, “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” heh.)
But to stay on topic here…this is a biography of one of the first Romantic poets, William Wordsworth! (Though it also dips a fair bit into philosophy and ponderings about individuals who are not Wordsworth.) Bate’s hinge on the word “radical,” as well as using a younger portrait of Wordsworth on the cover, vs the more staid old man portrait, is his claim to individuality. He posits that Wordsworth’s best work was written in the first half of his life, when he was more idealistic and less cynical. (The French Revolution that led to Napoleon rather than British-style democracy played a big part in the shift.)
In terms of Wordsworth’s actual life, beyond his stanzas and devotion to his home in the Lake County, we get a bit of a skeleton outline: a heady affair and a child out of wedlock in his youth, a later marriage that Bate found to be healthy due to passionate love letters and several children born, and his collaboration with his sister Dorothy and his friend/fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The two of them complimented each other’s works until they fell out of favor with each other, largely due to Coleridge’s drug addiction and obsession with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, so it seems.
So Wordsworth was the oldest (and also longest lived) Romantic poet. The “second generation” of poets like Shelley and Byron dismissed Wordsworth for too much focus on the self, and for selling out vis a vis government posts. Earlier contemporaries poo pooed at his “radicalness” for describing nature, the poor and spirituality that was not necessarily tied to religion. These are the types of focuses, Bate argued, that made Wordsworth into a visionary.
At one point Bate makes the startling pronouncement that perhaps Wordsworth should have died young, a la Shelley and Byron and Keats, so that his Genius would have never gone to seed. And yet…was it perhaps in the latter half of his life when he turned to what we might now call nature preservation? The epilogue of this book is given over to the myriad of ways that Wordsworth helped to shape the future, not just with poetry and spirituality, but with a focus on the environment.
It was a more optimistic note than I expected for the end of this book. Bate spent much of the beginning making asides that when editing his poetry in later decades, Wordsworth often muted or obfuscated the truth about his passions. I was prepared to meet a, perhaps hypocritical conservative who abandoned his earlier ideals because people (and revolutions, specifically) aren’t perfect. Instead, it seems he found new ways to fight for what he believed in, even if his poetry output took a little bit of a dive.
Kudos to Bate for copious primary source usage, especially given how much by way of letters and etc have been lost over the years. It’s part of the reason, I assume, that the biography comes off as a little more philosophical than personal. I also liked getting to learn about his sister, Dorothy, as well as other female poets who actually put themselves out there in public. Just a reminder, as the book shows us in multiple ways, that the past isn’t too different from the present. It may be over 200 years later, but we still strive for revolution, fulfilment and camaraderie. We still get disappointed when things go awry, and we still find solace in the small stuff. At least that’s my take.
December 10, 2020
When I was sixteen, I started keeping a journal, to which I entrusted my innermost thoughts. I headed it with a quotation from Wordsworth: Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
I had first started reading Wordsworth seriously about a year earlier, having been given a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, which I read while staying with a great-aunt in Norfolk one summer. At that time, I was struggling with my Christian faith, having by then left the Roman Catholic Church; but my parents were concerned that my schooling should not be interrupted, so I remained at my Catholic grammar school, keeping quiet about my apostasy while I sat ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels.
In those years, I also discovered D.H. Lawrence, another intensely religious writer; and William and Bert became my imaginary friends, with whom I could not only share my doubts about religion as it was taught me but also explore another way of seeing the world. Wordsworth is often described as a pantheist, Lawrence sometimes as a pagan; and I found myself drawn to both these alternatives to mainstream Christianity, for they both appear to transcend what the poet Tom Cheetham has called the “poisonous dualism of matter and spirit.”
I certainly see Wordsworth as being a pantheist in his youth, but he appears to have ultimately sacrificed “the visionary gleam” for the safety of religious orthodoxy (as would T.S. Eliot). However, I now think he would better be described as a panentheist – that is, as someone who believes that God is in everything and everything is in God. For the theist, deity is transcendent (God creates everything); for the pantheist, deity is immanent (God is everything, everything is God); for the panentheist, deity is both transcendent and immanent. And isn’t that what we find in the justly famous lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
The (transcendent) spirit whose dwelling is the light rolls through all things (immanence). Or, as Blake put it, everything that lives is holy.
Jonathan Bate comments that Wordsworth’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge “would have called that motion and spirit ‘God’ or ‘the Infinite Mind.’ Wordsworth locates it firmly in the landscape in which he is walking, and that is why ‘Tintern Abbey’ was regarded by some as the work of a pantheist.” When, later on, Wordsworth describes himself as ‘A worshipper of Nature’, how literally does he mean it? “To a conservative Christian sensibility,” says Bate, “this was not merely blasphemous but dangerously close to the materialism of those revolutionary thinkers who influenced the unorthodox ideas of radicals…”
Wordsworth’s slightly older contemporary William Blake, who was opposed to materialism and conservative Christianity in equal measure, was also not impressed by nature-worship: I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man Continually & then he is No Poet but a Heathen Philosopher at Enmity against all true Poetry or Inspiration, which come from the Imagination; and Natural Objects, he wrote, obliterated Imagination in him.
Bate sees the Gnostic in Blake setting Nature against the Spirit. But if, as Wordsworth believed, the Imagination could transcend the split between Nature and Man, could it not also overcome the enmity between inspiration and heathenism? Perhaps Blake and Wordsworth are just approaching the same (panentheist) truth from different directions: Wordsworth imagines the spirit rolling through all things, Blake imagines all things as holy. It is interesting to note that the term ‘panentheism’ was only coined in 1828, the year after Blake’s death; I see him as a panentheist avant la lettre…
When I went to study English Literature at university, I wrote a long essay on visionary perception in the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake and Eliot. Of the three, it was only Blake who kept the “gleam” alive throughout his life. Eliot shrank from it: Where Blake held infinity in the palm of his hand, Eliot saw fear in a handful of dust.
For Wordsworth, it was more like a long, slow fading away of “the vision splendid”, as he puts it in his 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality.' He had once seen the Earth “apparelled in celestial light”; and in a poignant later Ode, he describes how “an evening of extraordinary splendour” would miraculously restore the lost light, if only briefly: This glimpse of glory, he would ask, why renewed?
In the Immortality Ode he asks where the glorious light has gone (Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?) and then talks of where it and we come from:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
So, we have come from our home in God and we are still apparelled in the light of Heaven, therefore able to see that light spread out over the Earth. Here, as Bate puts it, Wordsworth has “framed eternity via an image of pre-existence. He was criticized for this by orthodox Christians, for whom eternity was an afterlife…” But for Wordsworth, we are in Heaven before and after earthly life; and, in blessed moments, during life:
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither…
What we start to forget when we are born is the shore beyond that sea. During the course of my life, I have had some moments of anamnesis, glimpses of that immortal sea. Twelve years ago, I glimpsed it again, reflected in the partly frozen waters of Llandrindod Lake, beneath the icy woods. The light was dancing on the lake; and I wept tears of compassion, knowing That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.
Some thoughts are not too deep for tears.
I had first started reading Wordsworth seriously about a year earlier, having been given a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, which I read while staying with a great-aunt in Norfolk one summer. At that time, I was struggling with my Christian faith, having by then left the Roman Catholic Church; but my parents were concerned that my schooling should not be interrupted, so I remained at my Catholic grammar school, keeping quiet about my apostasy while I sat ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels.
In those years, I also discovered D.H. Lawrence, another intensely religious writer; and William and Bert became my imaginary friends, with whom I could not only share my doubts about religion as it was taught me but also explore another way of seeing the world. Wordsworth is often described as a pantheist, Lawrence sometimes as a pagan; and I found myself drawn to both these alternatives to mainstream Christianity, for they both appear to transcend what the poet Tom Cheetham has called the “poisonous dualism of matter and spirit.”
I certainly see Wordsworth as being a pantheist in his youth, but he appears to have ultimately sacrificed “the visionary gleam” for the safety of religious orthodoxy (as would T.S. Eliot). However, I now think he would better be described as a panentheist – that is, as someone who believes that God is in everything and everything is in God. For the theist, deity is transcendent (God creates everything); for the pantheist, deity is immanent (God is everything, everything is God); for the panentheist, deity is both transcendent and immanent. And isn’t that what we find in the justly famous lines from ‘Tintern Abbey’:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
The (transcendent) spirit whose dwelling is the light rolls through all things (immanence). Or, as Blake put it, everything that lives is holy.
Jonathan Bate comments that Wordsworth’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge “would have called that motion and spirit ‘God’ or ‘the Infinite Mind.’ Wordsworth locates it firmly in the landscape in which he is walking, and that is why ‘Tintern Abbey’ was regarded by some as the work of a pantheist.” When, later on, Wordsworth describes himself as ‘A worshipper of Nature’, how literally does he mean it? “To a conservative Christian sensibility,” says Bate, “this was not merely blasphemous but dangerously close to the materialism of those revolutionary thinkers who influenced the unorthodox ideas of radicals…”
Wordsworth’s slightly older contemporary William Blake, who was opposed to materialism and conservative Christianity in equal measure, was also not impressed by nature-worship: I see in Wordsworth the Natural Man rising up against the Spiritual Man Continually & then he is No Poet but a Heathen Philosopher at Enmity against all true Poetry or Inspiration, which come from the Imagination; and Natural Objects, he wrote, obliterated Imagination in him.
Bate sees the Gnostic in Blake setting Nature against the Spirit. But if, as Wordsworth believed, the Imagination could transcend the split between Nature and Man, could it not also overcome the enmity between inspiration and heathenism? Perhaps Blake and Wordsworth are just approaching the same (panentheist) truth from different directions: Wordsworth imagines the spirit rolling through all things, Blake imagines all things as holy. It is interesting to note that the term ‘panentheism’ was only coined in 1828, the year after Blake’s death; I see him as a panentheist avant la lettre…
When I went to study English Literature at university, I wrote a long essay on visionary perception in the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake and Eliot. Of the three, it was only Blake who kept the “gleam” alive throughout his life. Eliot shrank from it: Where Blake held infinity in the palm of his hand, Eliot saw fear in a handful of dust.
For Wordsworth, it was more like a long, slow fading away of “the vision splendid”, as he puts it in his 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality.' He had once seen the Earth “apparelled in celestial light”; and in a poignant later Ode, he describes how “an evening of extraordinary splendour” would miraculously restore the lost light, if only briefly: This glimpse of glory, he would ask, why renewed?
In the Immortality Ode he asks where the glorious light has gone (Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?) and then talks of where it and we come from:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
So, we have come from our home in God and we are still apparelled in the light of Heaven, therefore able to see that light spread out over the Earth. Here, as Bate puts it, Wordsworth has “framed eternity via an image of pre-existence. He was criticized for this by orthodox Christians, for whom eternity was an afterlife…” But for Wordsworth, we are in Heaven before and after earthly life; and, in blessed moments, during life:
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither…
What we start to forget when we are born is the shore beyond that sea. During the course of my life, I have had some moments of anamnesis, glimpses of that immortal sea. Twelve years ago, I glimpsed it again, reflected in the partly frozen waters of Llandrindod Lake, beneath the icy woods. The light was dancing on the lake; and I wept tears of compassion, knowing That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.
Some thoughts are not too deep for tears.
July 8, 2025
I had the privilege of visiting Grasmere in the Lake District last month—a place I have yearned to return to for over a decade having developed a profound love and appreciation for English Romanticism, and particularly, the poetry of William Wordsworth. I visited his former home in Rydal Mount, stood in his attic-room study, and then outside to admire his splendid garden. Finally, I stood by his grave at St. Oswalds and uttered solemn thanks to the man whose poetry has contributed so much meaning to my life. Then, perambulating down a quaint street in Ambleside the next day, I couldn't resist the temptation to purchase Radical Wordsworth by Jonathan Bate, fortuitously discounted to £5.99.
Radical Wordsworth is an extensive biography of the man who made an indelible impact on English literature, to the extent that his influence renders him among the great English bards: Shakespeare and Milton. Bate structures his book by loosely adhering to the chronology of Wordsworth’s Prelude, thus beginning with the poet’s boyhood.
Wordsworth’s life was marked by tragedy: he lost both parents at a very young age and was separated from his sister Dorothy before attending Hawkshead Grammar School. Nature became a kind of surrogate parent to the boy, who spent his childhood intrepidly shouldering naked crags, hanging on perilous ridges by ravens’ nests, or wandering through gloomy woods to mimic the sonorous hooting of the owl—and, on a deeper level, to hold:
“Unconscious intercourse with the eternal beauty, drinking in a pure organic pleasure from the lines of curling mist, or from the smooth expanse of waters coloured by the cloudless moon.”
Like Goethe’s maudlin, lovesick protagonist Werther, Wordsworth embodied all the qualities that came to typify Romanticism: he glorified nature to an almost pantheistic degree and saw the solace of the countryside as a bulwark against the stress of the city—as he notes in his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” In lieu of his parents kneeling beside his bed at night, Wordsworth, hearing the cadent murmurs of the nearby Derwent River, plaintively equates this natural music to nursery songs that lulled him to sleep:
"Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,
And, from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams? For this, didst thou,
O Derwent! winding among grassy holms
Where I was looking on, a babe in arms,
Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts
To more than infant softness, giving me
Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind
A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm
That Nature breathes among the hills and groves?"
A good portion of the book is devoted to Wordsworth’s development as a poet, with aptly selected excerpts and insightful analysis from Bate. This is balanced with detailed accounts of significant life events. Wordsworth’s deep friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge is delineated with considerable care, charting their creative collaborations and the intimate details of their shared experiences through letters. The subsequent fallout between the two men is also covered at length—largely due, it would seem, to Coleridge’s opium addiction, which Wordsworth not only admirably tolerated but was also magnanimous enough to forgive in later years after a series of recriminations.
Such meticulous detail is also given to Wordsworth's circle of family and friends. Bate provides vivid accounts of their lives from multiple perspectives and tracks the ensuing vicissitudes that occur—from the tumultuous early years of the French Revolution (during which Wordsworth fathered a child out of wedlock with Annette Vallon), to the more stable years in the Lakes, which precipitated a burgeoning period of creativity, intellectual collaborations, the honing of his craft, and the foundation of a family life with his sister Dorothy and wife Mary Hutchinson.
Towards the latter part of the book, we come to learn how significantly Wordsworth’s life was marred by grief. He lost his brother Jonathan in a sea disaster, his infant son John shortly after birth, his three-year-old daughter Catherine to measles, and then his six-year-old son Thomas in the same year. The cumulative effect of such bereavement cannot be dismissed lightly, and yet it seems to have been by many so-called supporters of Wordsworth.
Indeed, he was shamelessly pilloried and lambasted by the second generation of Romantics—namely Percy Shelley and Lord Byron—ostensibly because they deemed the quality of his verse to have waned with age. In reality, they were incensed that Wordsworth’s political sensibilities had shifted toward conservatism. Like peevish children, they mercilessly attacked the man to whom they owed their professional literary inheritance—a hypocrisy made even starker when one considers how indignantly they responded to critics who denigrated their contemporary, John Keats. Shelley even suggested that the harshness of these reviews contributed to Keats’ premature death.
Even Bate seems mildly sympathetic to this condemnation of Wordsworth’s later poetic efforts, inferring an almost incredulous astonishment that the great man’s talents could fizzle out to such a mundane extent. To my mind, given the trauma of losing so many loved ones in various tragic circumstances, it is a wonder he retained his sanity at all, never mind producing inferior verse in middle age.
An aged Wordsworth was also a disappointment to those who visited him at Rydal Mount in later years, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. The old man had vehement opinions on the state of the nation, which Ralph had to suffer through before coaxing a few lines from the old hits from Lyrical Ballads out of him. Bearing in mind, that around this time, Wordsworth’s forty-year-old daughter was slowly dying of tuberculosis, and his beloved sister Dorothy was not only incontinent but mentally deranged—probably suffering from what would now be deemed Alzheimer’s disease. So, the man has my sympathy for bearing up under such circumstances.
I'll concede it sounds as though Wordsworth grew to be slightly vain and egocentric later in life—but who wouldn't, if you had built that level of reputation, becoming tantamount to an apotheosis in the literary world? Moreover, having been surrounded by sycophantic admirers for decades, with artists depicting you as some august statesman in pensive thought at the top of Helvellyn.
Wordsworth, though he conducted himself with admirable rectitude for the most part of his life, was not a saint; he was a flawed human like us all. He made mistakes in his personal as well as his professional life. However, his contributions to English poetry, and his inimitably unique way of articulating the sensory and spiritual communion one experiences with the natural world and the sublime, were both pioneering and revolutionary.
Thanks to Wordsworth’s poetry, and scholastically excellent works such as this by Jonathan Bate, my earnest and ongoing commitment in life is to fill and cultivate my mind so as to make it a mansion for lovely forms, and:
“Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man, but with high objects, with enduring things, with life and nature, purifying thus the elements of feeling and of thought, and sanctifying, by such discipline, both pain and fear, until we recognise a grandeur in the beatings of the heart.”
Radical Wordsworth is an extensive biography of the man who made an indelible impact on English literature, to the extent that his influence renders him among the great English bards: Shakespeare and Milton. Bate structures his book by loosely adhering to the chronology of Wordsworth’s Prelude, thus beginning with the poet’s boyhood.
Wordsworth’s life was marked by tragedy: he lost both parents at a very young age and was separated from his sister Dorothy before attending Hawkshead Grammar School. Nature became a kind of surrogate parent to the boy, who spent his childhood intrepidly shouldering naked crags, hanging on perilous ridges by ravens’ nests, or wandering through gloomy woods to mimic the sonorous hooting of the owl—and, on a deeper level, to hold:
“Unconscious intercourse with the eternal beauty, drinking in a pure organic pleasure from the lines of curling mist, or from the smooth expanse of waters coloured by the cloudless moon.”
Like Goethe’s maudlin, lovesick protagonist Werther, Wordsworth embodied all the qualities that came to typify Romanticism: he glorified nature to an almost pantheistic degree and saw the solace of the countryside as a bulwark against the stress of the city—as he notes in his poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” In lieu of his parents kneeling beside his bed at night, Wordsworth, hearing the cadent murmurs of the nearby Derwent River, plaintively equates this natural music to nursery songs that lulled him to sleep:
"Was it for this
That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved
To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song,
And, from his alder shades and rocky falls,
And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
That flowed along my dreams? For this, didst thou,
O Derwent! winding among grassy holms
Where I was looking on, a babe in arms,
Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts
To more than infant softness, giving me
Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind
A foretaste, a dim earnest, of the calm
That Nature breathes among the hills and groves?"
A good portion of the book is devoted to Wordsworth’s development as a poet, with aptly selected excerpts and insightful analysis from Bate. This is balanced with detailed accounts of significant life events. Wordsworth’s deep friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge is delineated with considerable care, charting their creative collaborations and the intimate details of their shared experiences through letters. The subsequent fallout between the two men is also covered at length—largely due, it would seem, to Coleridge’s opium addiction, which Wordsworth not only admirably tolerated but was also magnanimous enough to forgive in later years after a series of recriminations.
Such meticulous detail is also given to Wordsworth's circle of family and friends. Bate provides vivid accounts of their lives from multiple perspectives and tracks the ensuing vicissitudes that occur—from the tumultuous early years of the French Revolution (during which Wordsworth fathered a child out of wedlock with Annette Vallon), to the more stable years in the Lakes, which precipitated a burgeoning period of creativity, intellectual collaborations, the honing of his craft, and the foundation of a family life with his sister Dorothy and wife Mary Hutchinson.
Towards the latter part of the book, we come to learn how significantly Wordsworth’s life was marred by grief. He lost his brother Jonathan in a sea disaster, his infant son John shortly after birth, his three-year-old daughter Catherine to measles, and then his six-year-old son Thomas in the same year. The cumulative effect of such bereavement cannot be dismissed lightly, and yet it seems to have been by many so-called supporters of Wordsworth.
Indeed, he was shamelessly pilloried and lambasted by the second generation of Romantics—namely Percy Shelley and Lord Byron—ostensibly because they deemed the quality of his verse to have waned with age. In reality, they were incensed that Wordsworth’s political sensibilities had shifted toward conservatism. Like peevish children, they mercilessly attacked the man to whom they owed their professional literary inheritance—a hypocrisy made even starker when one considers how indignantly they responded to critics who denigrated their contemporary, John Keats. Shelley even suggested that the harshness of these reviews contributed to Keats’ premature death.
Even Bate seems mildly sympathetic to this condemnation of Wordsworth’s later poetic efforts, inferring an almost incredulous astonishment that the great man’s talents could fizzle out to such a mundane extent. To my mind, given the trauma of losing so many loved ones in various tragic circumstances, it is a wonder he retained his sanity at all, never mind producing inferior verse in middle age.
An aged Wordsworth was also a disappointment to those who visited him at Rydal Mount in later years, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. The old man had vehement opinions on the state of the nation, which Ralph had to suffer through before coaxing a few lines from the old hits from Lyrical Ballads out of him. Bearing in mind, that around this time, Wordsworth’s forty-year-old daughter was slowly dying of tuberculosis, and his beloved sister Dorothy was not only incontinent but mentally deranged—probably suffering from what would now be deemed Alzheimer’s disease. So, the man has my sympathy for bearing up under such circumstances.
I'll concede it sounds as though Wordsworth grew to be slightly vain and egocentric later in life—but who wouldn't, if you had built that level of reputation, becoming tantamount to an apotheosis in the literary world? Moreover, having been surrounded by sycophantic admirers for decades, with artists depicting you as some august statesman in pensive thought at the top of Helvellyn.
Wordsworth, though he conducted himself with admirable rectitude for the most part of his life, was not a saint; he was a flawed human like us all. He made mistakes in his personal as well as his professional life. However, his contributions to English poetry, and his inimitably unique way of articulating the sensory and spiritual communion one experiences with the natural world and the sublime, were both pioneering and revolutionary.
Thanks to Wordsworth’s poetry, and scholastically excellent works such as this by Jonathan Bate, my earnest and ongoing commitment in life is to fill and cultivate my mind so as to make it a mansion for lovely forms, and:
“Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man, but with high objects, with enduring things, with life and nature, purifying thus the elements of feeling and of thought, and sanctifying, by such discipline, both pain and fear, until we recognise a grandeur in the beatings of the heart.”
April 9, 2025
Bate gooit Wordsworth effe onder de bus door te suggereren dat de beste man tussen de 22 en 32 geen seks heeft gehad (en daarom zulke goede poëzie schreef). Ik weet niet wat ik daarmee moet.
September 26, 2024
Such a deeper appreciation of Wordsworth (blemishes and all). Interesting that most of his peers (Keats, Shelley, Byron and Coleridge) predeceased him at very young ages. Amazing the number of is influences (Emerson, John Muir, Beatrix Potter, &c.). Very helpful to hear the background to so many poems: Ode on Intimations of Immortality, Tintern Abbey, Lonely as a cloud, world is too much with us, beauteous evening, &c.
November 7, 2020
Excellent non-fiction book about Wordsworth by an expert and an admirable writer. Beautifully written, riveting. Bate knows how to piece together a wordsworthian narrative that comes close to its subject, is almost poetry in itself. Love!
November 14, 2021
Read for The Booktube Prize 2021
September 1, 2022
Bate explains that Wordsworth is less boring than you think: He celebrated revolution, discovered nature, replaced religion with poetry, and made the individual the fit subject of a great epic.
July 2, 2021
What a long, rich life, Wordsworth had! I've really enjoyed reading this kind of literary biography this year. Bate skillfully builds a portrait of Wordsworth as a man and a poet, tracing the real-life influences of the poetry without robbing it of its lyrical power. Indeed, in a writer so autobiographical as Wordworth, would it even be possible to meaningfully discuss the texts without referencing the originating self? Perhaps. In any case, Bate's account is one I found myself thoroughly immersed in: thoughtful, liberal, enchanting.
I was particularly engrossed by the portrait of Dorothy Wordsworth, a crucial figure, by any account, in her brother's ouvre. She was his creative partner (she, Wordsworth and Coleridge formed a poetic triad of which she emerged the sole non-published pen), muse (if the Lucy poems can be said to have been inspired by anyone, Bate opines, it was mostly Dorothy), amanuensis and steadfast lifelong support.
On the other hand, I found the account of the ups and downs of Wordsworth's relationship with Coleridge similarly fascinating. What a remarkable bond: marked by deep intimacy and a certain creative bond, yet mired by professional and personal jealousies. Even more interesting and bittersweet was Bate's exploration of Wordsworth's steady poetic decline. Many, some while Wordsworth still lived, have tried to account for it. Could it simply be old age? The political disenchantment that came with the failure of the revolution? Married bliss? Who's to say. Bate, in a particularly cruel thought experiment, concludes that, had Wordsworth died tragically young like Byron, Keats or Shelley, one or two of the 'good poems' (including 'Surprised by Joy') would have been lost at most.
Bate's biography is driven in part by the question, on the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth's birth last year, what does Wordsworth have to offer the twenty-first century? In truth, it would be hard to find a poet more evergreen! Wordsworth’s life and work stands as a testament to the endurance of that desire to pull away from industrial society, to retreat to nature in search of solace, peace, consolation.
I was particularly engrossed by the portrait of Dorothy Wordsworth, a crucial figure, by any account, in her brother's ouvre. She was his creative partner (she, Wordsworth and Coleridge formed a poetic triad of which she emerged the sole non-published pen), muse (if the Lucy poems can be said to have been inspired by anyone, Bate opines, it was mostly Dorothy), amanuensis and steadfast lifelong support.
On the other hand, I found the account of the ups and downs of Wordsworth's relationship with Coleridge similarly fascinating. What a remarkable bond: marked by deep intimacy and a certain creative bond, yet mired by professional and personal jealousies. Even more interesting and bittersweet was Bate's exploration of Wordsworth's steady poetic decline. Many, some while Wordsworth still lived, have tried to account for it. Could it simply be old age? The political disenchantment that came with the failure of the revolution? Married bliss? Who's to say. Bate, in a particularly cruel thought experiment, concludes that, had Wordsworth died tragically young like Byron, Keats or Shelley, one or two of the 'good poems' (including 'Surprised by Joy') would have been lost at most.
Bate's biography is driven in part by the question, on the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth's birth last year, what does Wordsworth have to offer the twenty-first century? In truth, it would be hard to find a poet more evergreen! Wordsworth’s life and work stands as a testament to the endurance of that desire to pull away from industrial society, to retreat to nature in search of solace, peace, consolation.
July 14, 2020
Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World is a biography of William Wordsworth, an English Romantic poet. Jonathan Bate is a British academic, biographer, critic, broadcaster, novelist and scholar wrote this biography.
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth's birth (7 April 2020), Bate wrote this timely biography. Bracingly candid about the superiority of Wordsworth’s early output to his later work, 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 the 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.
Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World is written and researched rather well. Bate wrote a wonderful biography, who appealingly conveying his own love of and frustrations with Wordsworth, Bate demonstrates in his delightful volume how, flaws and all, Wordsworth made a difference in the way future generations would think and feel.
All in all, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World is an energetic literary biography on one of the fathers of English Romanticism poetry – Williams Wordsworth.
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads.
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth's birth (7 April 2020), Bate wrote this timely biography. Bracingly candid about the superiority of Wordsworth’s early output to his later work, 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 the 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.
Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World is written and researched rather well. Bate wrote a wonderful biography, who appealingly conveying his own love of and frustrations with Wordsworth, Bate demonstrates in his delightful volume how, flaws and all, Wordsworth made a difference in the way future generations would think and feel.
All in all, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World is an energetic literary biography on one of the fathers of English Romanticism poetry – Williams Wordsworth.
June 22, 2020
Brilliantly written as ever, Bate presents a millenarian Wordsworth, a Wordsworth whose late conservatism is taken off and replaced immediately by a revolutionary form of eco-mindedness, by egalitarian struggles, by a passion for liberty. For Bate, this problem presents itself as one of institutionalism and Freudian inner development, which is manifest in the quality of Wordsworth's early and late poetry. The early poems' exuberant energy is gone with the late 'institutional Wordsworth.' Bate finds this corresponding to Wordsworth's sexual life; in Wordsworth's radical years, his repressed nature was sublated into an ars poetica. However, in his late years where repression loosens and sublation weakens, we find him not only leaving the causes of liberty and equality he earlier fought for with passion, but his poetry also taking a mediocre turn, producing lifeless yet impassioned monotony.
Although I think this reading does a disservice to Wordsworth by emphasizing the boredom of his late poetry to reclaim the significance of his earlier radicalism, Bate is still a very elaborate, skillful biographer. His way of fusing literary biography with poetic criticism has something for experts and common readers alike. So whether you agree with his reading or not, his scholarship is hardly sloppy and is never uninteresting. The early Wordsworth of republicanist passions can indeed inspire and be inspired by the contemporariness of social struggles that continue to shape our historical modernity. His late poetry, however, should not be dismissed; the early Wordsworth talks of the beauty found in the rustic and the mundane, if we are to honor his earlier, radical self we ought to find a way to recognize the beauty in the mundanity of his late poetry as well.
Although I think this reading does a disservice to Wordsworth by emphasizing the boredom of his late poetry to reclaim the significance of his earlier radicalism, Bate is still a very elaborate, skillful biographer. His way of fusing literary biography with poetic criticism has something for experts and common readers alike. So whether you agree with his reading or not, his scholarship is hardly sloppy and is never uninteresting. The early Wordsworth of republicanist passions can indeed inspire and be inspired by the contemporariness of social struggles that continue to shape our historical modernity. His late poetry, however, should not be dismissed; the early Wordsworth talks of the beauty found in the rustic and the mundane, if we are to honor his earlier, radical self we ought to find a way to recognize the beauty in the mundanity of his late poetry as well.
August 28, 2024
This is an excellent (and highly readable) biography of the man who is probably the most important anglophone poet since Milton. If you enjoy Wordsworth’s poetry (or are interested in the Romantic movement), you will probably enjoy this book. But Bate doesn’t simply preach to the converted; he gives reasons why people should be interested in Wordsworth even if they are not card-carrying Wordsworth devotees (yet). This biography is particularly important because it centers what Matthew Arnold has called Wordsworth’s “healing power.” Here’s a taste:
“Why should we still care about Wordsworth today? Because he reminds us that we need to care for our children and to cherish a child's way of looking at the world. Because he wrote with unprecedented sympathy for the poor, the excluded and the broken. Because his poetry has been for many, and can still be for some, a medium of solace and an oasis of calm in a noisy and stressful world, even a medicine for mental illness. Because his elegiac poetry can speak to us when we are bereaved. Because he expressed humankind's longing for the infinite and our sense of something far more deeply interfused' - the 'oceanic feeling - in a way that was not dependent on religious dogma. Because he changed the way we perceive, inhabit and preserve the wilder Places of the natural world. But above all, on our fragile planet and with our uncertain ecological future, because, at the very beginning of the industrial era that scientists have christened the Anthropocene, he foresaw that among the consequences of modernity would be not only the alienation of human being from each other, but also potentially irretrievable damage to the delicate balance between our species and our environment.”
“Why should we still care about Wordsworth today? Because he reminds us that we need to care for our children and to cherish a child's way of looking at the world. Because he wrote with unprecedented sympathy for the poor, the excluded and the broken. Because his poetry has been for many, and can still be for some, a medium of solace and an oasis of calm in a noisy and stressful world, even a medicine for mental illness. Because his elegiac poetry can speak to us when we are bereaved. Because he expressed humankind's longing for the infinite and our sense of something far more deeply interfused' - the 'oceanic feeling - in a way that was not dependent on religious dogma. Because he changed the way we perceive, inhabit and preserve the wilder Places of the natural world. But above all, on our fragile planet and with our uncertain ecological future, because, at the very beginning of the industrial era that scientists have christened the Anthropocene, he foresaw that among the consequences of modernity would be not only the alienation of human being from each other, but also potentially irretrievable damage to the delicate balance between our species and our environment.”
August 28, 2024
There are some biographies that brilliantly take the reader from a place of disinterest to fascination. This is not one of those. There are some biographies that, while exploring one man's life, open up history in a new way and expand the reader's understanding of an era. This is not one of those either. This biography tells the very boring story of Wordsworth's life.
I did manage to finish the book, so it wasn't so tedious that it quite literally drove me away, but it likely wasn't worth the time I invested to finish it. I have my Goodreads goal though...so.... The author seemed to have a knack for summarizing the most interesting parts of Wordsworth's life, while exploring the most tedious aspects ad nausea. Take the entire chapter on which waterfall Wordsworth might have been referring to in a particular poem...who cares??
Ultimately, this book is for those who already love Wordsworth and want to learn more about him. I was hoping the book would inspire in me a desire to read more poetry and explore Wordsworth, much as Isaacson's work on Da Vinci drove me to appreciate art more deeply. It failed miserably.
My parting comment is on the conclusion of the book, where the author effectively tries to argue that poetry is on its way to replacing religion. To this I say...wow, yeah-nope! Religion is growing, poetry, aside from the musical form, is diminishing. Sorry friend, I think you committed the academic's sin of thinking you and your experiences reflect the common man.
I did manage to finish the book, so it wasn't so tedious that it quite literally drove me away, but it likely wasn't worth the time I invested to finish it. I have my Goodreads goal though...so.... The author seemed to have a knack for summarizing the most interesting parts of Wordsworth's life, while exploring the most tedious aspects ad nausea. Take the entire chapter on which waterfall Wordsworth might have been referring to in a particular poem...who cares??
Ultimately, this book is for those who already love Wordsworth and want to learn more about him. I was hoping the book would inspire in me a desire to read more poetry and explore Wordsworth, much as Isaacson's work on Da Vinci drove me to appreciate art more deeply. It failed miserably.
My parting comment is on the conclusion of the book, where the author effectively tries to argue that poetry is on its way to replacing religion. To this I say...wow, yeah-nope! Religion is growing, poetry, aside from the musical form, is diminishing. Sorry friend, I think you committed the academic's sin of thinking you and your experiences reflect the common man.
November 24, 2020
As a preface to this review: I greatly enjoy much of Wordsworth works, though it took me a while to come to that conclusion as I made the great mistake of reading them right through, in a collection that was formatted in chronological order. As such, the potency and child-like wonder found in his early works seems weighted down by the inefficiency and unoriginality of his later works.
This split between the genius word-smithing of his politically and socially charged youth and the decay of this genius in the latter half of his life, interestingly enough, at the same time he was finally achieving renown, is the format and focus of this work from Jonathan Bate. He does a wonderful job of linking the biographical with the creative and you aren't given excessive and unnecessary detail, rather, the dynamics between Wordsworth and his family (especially his great losses) as well as his associations with the likes of Coleridge, Keats, and others is made all the more potent through the resulting impact on his creative output.
This may be a large volume for those with only a passing interest in poetry, and would more likely serve the Wordsworth fan specifically if not the poetry reader more broadly.
This split between the genius word-smithing of his politically and socially charged youth and the decay of this genius in the latter half of his life, interestingly enough, at the same time he was finally achieving renown, is the format and focus of this work from Jonathan Bate. He does a wonderful job of linking the biographical with the creative and you aren't given excessive and unnecessary detail, rather, the dynamics between Wordsworth and his family (especially his great losses) as well as his associations with the likes of Coleridge, Keats, and others is made all the more potent through the resulting impact on his creative output.
This may be a large volume for those with only a passing interest in poetry, and would more likely serve the Wordsworth fan specifically if not the poetry reader more broadly.
August 1, 2020
The author celebrates Wordsworth as the consummate Nature poet, an original Radical, and a person of the most exquisite Sensibility (as in Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility”). He indeed changed his world for the better. Summing up, the Author states: “‘Poetry makes nothing happen’ wrote W. H. Auden In his poem on the death of fellow poet W. B. Yeats. He was wrong ... Radical Wordsworth survives today whenever a person walks for pleasure and takes spiritual refreshment in the mountains or when a heart leaps up at the sight of a rainbow in the sky or a tuft of primroses in flower.” ... a literary delight ...
Sense and Sensibility by
Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility by
Jane Austen
January 17, 2022
I'm not judging this book against a wealth of knowledge on Wordsworth, but I think this is a kind and hard look at the life of Wordsworth. He focuses a lot on the formative journeys and relationships of Wordsworth's youth and twenties, seeing them as the source of his genius.
Some of his points he often emphasizes quite often, like the one I'll paraphrase: "Never had a poet written with such feeling, or looked intently at the natural world and imbued it with such feeling and intensity. The landscape has forever changed for all of us that come after Wordsworth."
He judges the elder Wordsworth and blames his comfortable living, deep sorrow over the death of his children, and lack of radical politics as the reason for the pitiable lack of good poetry in the last 30-40 years of his life.
What I find really fascinating is the connection he makes near the end of the book between Wordsworth's most popular book during his lifetime, a travel/tourist guide to the Lakes. He connects this book's popularity to the protection of beautiful landscapes like the national parks that first began in the United States, and then later to Great Britain, particularly the Lake District.
Some of his points he often emphasizes quite often, like the one I'll paraphrase: "Never had a poet written with such feeling, or looked intently at the natural world and imbued it with such feeling and intensity. The landscape has forever changed for all of us that come after Wordsworth."
He judges the elder Wordsworth and blames his comfortable living, deep sorrow over the death of his children, and lack of radical politics as the reason for the pitiable lack of good poetry in the last 30-40 years of his life.
What I find really fascinating is the connection he makes near the end of the book between Wordsworth's most popular book during his lifetime, a travel/tourist guide to the Lakes. He connects this book's popularity to the protection of beautiful landscapes like the national parks that first began in the United States, and then later to Great Britain, particularly the Lake District.
October 31, 2020
When I picked up this book, I only knew Wordsworth through some of his poems. Quite soon I realized I had barely scratched the surface of the man and his legacy.
This book asks why reading Wordsworth is still important today. It answers that above all, the poet foresaw the consequences of modernity which in our time translates to the consequences of climate change. But this isn’t all. Wordsworth inspired new generations of poetry, art, prose, the ideas of John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, George Eliot, and the deeds of Canon Rawnsley, Stopford Brooke, and Beatrix Potter; and across the Atlantic, the visions of Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir: “The National Parks in the United States were described by the south-western writer Wallace Stegner as ‘America’s best idea.’ They were really Wordsworth’s best idea.” So claims Jonathan Bate, author of Radical Wordsworth.
This book asks why reading Wordsworth is still important today. It answers that above all, the poet foresaw the consequences of modernity which in our time translates to the consequences of climate change. But this isn’t all. Wordsworth inspired new generations of poetry, art, prose, the ideas of John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, George Eliot, and the deeds of Canon Rawnsley, Stopford Brooke, and Beatrix Potter; and across the Atlantic, the visions of Emerson, Thoreau, and John Muir: “The National Parks in the United States were described by the south-western writer Wallace Stegner as ‘America’s best idea.’ They were really Wordsworth’s best idea.” So claims Jonathan Bate, author of Radical Wordsworth.
May 9, 2023
I’m torn about what to think about this book. On the one hand, it offers an interesting perspective on the complex and intricately interweaved patterns of Wordsworth’s political and aesthetic radicalism. It’s also reasonably entertaining and well-written. On the other, Bates seems to have lost track of his threads—ending up with a muddled narrative and a muddied point. To be sure, there are quite a few individual good bits, especially the discussion of W.‘s late career and his betrayal of his youthful revolutionary values for milquetoast Toryism. But the bits are jumbled together like so much bric-a-brac in a hoarder’s basement, lacking a consistent organizing principle or structure. Further, Bates fails to sketch each scene with either the brevity of Plutarch or the luxuriance of Boswell.
The pieces are there for an excellent biography (it’s Wordsworth, after all), but they aren’t really tied together in a way that makes sense.
The pieces are there for an excellent biography (it’s Wordsworth, after all), but they aren’t really tied together in a way that makes sense.
May 12, 2020
First time reader of of"Jonathan Bates" and this was interesting to me because I have read the works of Wordsworth and like All poets,some I like some, some not so much. I don't know so much of him being a so call"Radical" but find this interesting. I learned a lot about his life,his likes and dislikes. What was behind some of his reasoning for poems,where they had come from. As in his personal life very informative and interesting in this writing from Jonathan Bates. You can tell much research has gone into this book. If you are interested in poetry if you are interested in this poet and his life this is a very good read. It was too me kinda slow starting out,but give it a chance it does get better! Received this from Net Gallery !
January 15, 2022
Someone wrote that you can’t be a good biographer if you dislike your subject. But the converse is also true: you can love them too much. This is a useful study of Wordsworth but excessive in its enthusiasm and claims for the poet, from the poetry itself to social impact. Wordsworth hardly needs an apologist but the Romantic movement was rather larger than one man - and a man whose effective writing career ended about 1820. To say, for instance, that the American National Park Service was Wordsworth’s idea is not only silly but evidence of a special pleading that rather runs away from the author. Ironically, Bate in his hagiography more resembles the later Wordsworth than the revolutionary poet.
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