Cover of Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World

Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World

by Jonathan Bate

625 pages2020Yale University PressISBN 9780300169645

About this book

On the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth comes a highly imaginative and vivid portrait of a revolutionary poet who embodied the spirit of his age Published in time for the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth’s birth, this is the biography of a great poetic genius, a revolutionary who changed the world. Wordsworth rejoiced in the French Revolution and played a central role in the cultural upheaval that we call the Romantic Revolution. He and his fellow Romantics changed forever the way we think about childhood, the sense of the self, our connection to the natural environment, and the purpose of poetry. But his was also a revolutionary life in the old sense of the word, insofar as his art was of memory, the return of the past, the circling back to childhood and youth. This beautifully written biography is purposefully fragmentary, momentary, and selective, opening up what Wordsworth called "the hiding-places of my power."

Publication Details

Publisher
Yale University Press
Published
2020
Pages
625
ISBN
9780300169645
Language
en

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