William Wordsworth
A Life
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- CHF 14.00
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- CHF 14.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
In this second edition of William Wordsworth: A Life, Stephen Gill draws on knowledge of the poet's creative practices and his reputation and influence in his life-time and beyond. Refusing to treat the poet's later years as of little interest, this biography presents a narrative of the whole of Wordsworth's long life--1770 to 1850--tracing the development from the adventurous youth who alone of the great Romantic poets saw life in revolutionary France to the old man who became Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate.
The various phases of Wordsworth's life are explored with a not uncritical sympathy; the narrative brings out the courage he and his wife and family were called upon to show as they crafted the life they wanted to lead. While the emphasis is on Wordsworth the writer, the personal relationships that nourished his creativity are fully treated, as are the historical circumstances that affected the production of his poetry. Wordsworth, it is widely believed, valued poetic spontaneity. He did, but he also took pains over every detail of the process of publication. The foundation of this second edition of the biography remains, as it was of the first, a conviction that Wordsworth's poetry, which has given pleasure and comfort to generations of readers in the past, will continue to do so in the years to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gill, tutor at Lincoln College, Oxford, has availed himself of the mass of recent Wordsworth scholarship, plus the large cache of the poet's family papers discovered in 1977, in producing this solid, intelligent and highly readable biography, which, while not neglecting Wordsworth as solitary visionary, brings out his determination to be an intellectual power in the land. Concentrating on Wordsworth the writer, Gill intersperses sensitive commentary on his poetic oeuvre, giving major attention to The Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude , with a running account of his family life, friendships and travels. His was a life containing much hardship heroically endured. Wordsworth's friendship with Coleridge, which helped inspire his early poetic blaze, gradually went sour; his poetry never earned him a livelihood and for 20 years was widely scorned; and the deaths of some of his closest friends and three of his children were stunning blows. Gill sends us back to the poetry with renewed interest, while enlarging our respect for the poet's rugged commitment to his muse. Illustrations.
