William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford Lives) - Softcover

Gill, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192827472 ISBN 13: 9780192827470

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1990

Synopsis

At the age of twenty-eight, William Wordsworth had neither a settled income nor the professional qualifications needed to secure one. He had no home, and he could not support the illegitimate child he had fathered during an impetuous love affair in France. The total sum of his achievements since he had left Cambridge consisted of one slim, anonymously issued volume of Lyrical Ballads. Recognition came slowly, but by age seventy, he was revered as a cultural icon, the Poet Laureate of England, and the most celebrated native of the Lake Country.
Based on an intimate knowledge of the poet's manuscripts, on a fresh assessment of contemporary records, and a careful analysis of a wealth of new research, this vividly written volume presents the first serious biography of Wordsworth to appear in over twenty-five years. Stephen Gill, a leading authority on Wordsworth, reveals that, in many ways, this giant of English literature led a heroic life. Despite critical condemnation, numbing blows from the death of friends and family, including three of his own children, and his inability to earn a living as a writer in his early years, his dedication to his art did not waver. Moreover, Gill corrects the image of the older Wordsworth as a stodgy betrayer of his radical youth. While his politics certainly did change, and his poetic power waned from 1799 almost to his death in 1850, Wordsworth single-mindedly shaped his own life in submission to a power of imagination whose importance he never doubted.
Offering unparalleled insight into Wordsworth's poetic achievement, Gill illuminates what was most essential to Wordsworth himself: his life as a writer.

About this title

Review:

The most scholarly and up-to-date book on Wordsworth... His judgement and interests are eminently sensible and show a full picture of Wordsworth. (Nikolai Tolstoy, Daily Mail)

Impressive new Clarendon biography ...William Wordsworth: A Life is every inch the new definitive work. Gill has taken full account of Wordsworth studies in the past 30 years, blended the new materials with the old, and come out with a book that is scholarly, readable, likely to last. (Jonathan Wordsworth, Sunday Times)

excellent biography of Wordsworth ... Gill is master of the very extensive primary and secondary sources, and a particular expert on the manuscripts, which the poet subjected to constant revision. (William Scammell, The Listener)

not least among the virtues of this excellent biography is the way in which Stephen Gill balances the inner against the external man ... This is the kind of biography which any writer would be delighted to inspire, let alone deserve ... it is a measure of the significance of this biography that its seriousness matches that of Wordsworth itself. (Peter Ackroyd, The Times)

all stolid good sense (Blake Morrison, The Bookseller)

thorough, scholarly biography (Anthony Powell, Weekend Telegraph)

Stephen Gill's new biography ... is enormously well-informed and avoids extravagant speculation, ... It provides an entertaining, shrewd, and manageably-sized narrative of Wordsworth's life (Peter Swaab, Sunday Telegraph)

Stephen Gill's admirable biography ... it succeeds, where such biographies often fail, in transforming the life into the work by actively exploring, not avoiding, the complex problems that Wordsworth's self-account presents to his biographer. (London Review of Books)

lively, painstaking book (Archie Hind, Glasgow Herald)

thorough, scholarly biography (Anthony Powell, Daily Telegraph)

Book Description:

Part of the Phoenix Harback poetry series

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0192827472
• ISBN 13: 9780192827470
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 552