Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years

by Nicholas Roe

This study is a much-needed reappraisal of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical careers before their emergence as major poets. Dr Roe presents a detailed examination of both writers' debts to radical dissent in the years before 1789.

Wordsworth's first-hand experience of Revolution in France is treated in depth, and both Wordsworth's and Coleridge's relations with William Godwin and John Thelwall are clarified. In each case the poets are shown to have been vividly alive to radical issues in Britain and France, and much more
closely involved with the popular reform movement represented by the London Corresponding Society than has hitherto been suspected.

The author argues against any generalized pattern of withdrawal from politics into retirement after 1795. He offers instead a reading of Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, and The Recluse that emphasizes the integration of imaginative life and radical experience. For Coleridge the loss of
revolutionary idealism prefigured the collapse of his creative and personal life after 1798. For Wordsworth, on the other hand, revolutionary failure was the key to his emergence as poet of Tintern Abbey and The Prelude.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

324 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 1988

Reviews

[CCShiu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very engaging account of the poets' responses to French Revolutionary discourses and the tremendous pressure of the times.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, maybe even authoritative, examination of their political views and activities in the 1790s. But dry as dust, and with some curious omissions. Notably, the Pantisocracy scheme of Coleridge and Southey rates barely a mention, when it is clearly the most ambitious plan any of them ever conceived. There is more scholarship out there on the subject; why wasn't that tapped? Not thorough enough.