The Life of William Wordsworth A Critical Biography [Hardcover]

By examining the family and financial circumstances of Wordsworth’s early years, this illuminating biography reshapes our understanding of the great Romantic poet’s most creative period of life and writing.

 

• Features new research into Wordsworth’s financial situation, and into how the poet and his family survived financially
• Offers a new understanding of the role of his great unwritten poem ‘The Recluse’
• Presents a new assessment of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments x

Abbreviations and Texts xii

Foreword: “The Prelude”: A Poem of My Own Life? xvii

Part I Early Years 1

1 Versions of Home: 1770–83 3

2 Hawkshead and Esthwaite: 1783–7 18

3 Cambridge: 1787–90 37

4 To the Alps: and What Followed: 1790–1 53

5 Annette Vallon, Michel de Beaupuy, and the Bishop of Llandaff: 1791–3 69

Part II Writer 91

6 Salisbury Plain and its Consequences: 1793–5 93

7 Racedown: 1795–7 113

8 Coleridge and Alfoxton: 1797–8 135 9

Lyrical Ballads: 1798 157

10 Hamburg to the Harz: 1798 173

11 Writing in Goslar: 1798–9 183

12 Sockburn to Grasmere: 1799–1800 198

Part III Town-End 213

13 “Home at Grasmere,” the “Ode,” “Michael”: 1800–1 215&ló¢