Wordsworth book club
Wonderful biography Wordsworth Finished this book as in kind of gave up somewhere after halfway Reasons 1 Wordsworth doesn t give up much of himself in his personal correspondence you don t get to know him as you do from reading the Prelude say so a life in letters is a bit of a challenge and 2 after an exciting youth about which Wordsworth left surprisingly few epistolary remains see 1 he didn t such a very exciting life and got boring as he got older Wordsworth I cracked open this book and nearly screamed in horror Almost 500 pages of text which is not so bad but the typeface is microscopic Hmm do I really want to know that much about Wordsworth This one might accidentally slip back to the bottom of my to read stack Wordsworth 
Juliet R V Barker born 1958 is a British historian specialising in the Middle Ages and literary biography She is the author of a number of well regarded works on the Bront s William Wordsworth and medieval tournaments From 1983 to 1989 she was the curator and librarian of the Bront Parsonage Museum. Wordsworth grave Barker was educated at Bradford Girls Grammar School and St Annes College Oxford where she gained her doctorate in medieval history In 1999 she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Bradford She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature Juliet R V Barker born 1958 is a British historian specialising in the Middle Ages and literary biography She is the author of a number of well regarded works on the Bront s William Wordsworth and medieval tournaments From 1983 to 1989 she was the curator and librarian of the Bront Parsonage Museum. Wordsworth grasmere Barker was educated at Bradford Girls Grammar School and St Anne s College Oxford where she gained her doctorate in medieval history In 1999 she was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Bradford She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature site_link William Wordsworth s early life reads like a novel Orphaned at a young age and dependent on the charity of unsympathetic relatives he became the archetypal teenage rebel Refusing to enter the Church he went instead to Revolutionary France where he fathered an illegitimate daughter and became a committed Republican His poetry was as revolutionary as his politics challenging convention in form style and subject and earning him the universal derision and contempt of critics Only the unfailing encouragement of a tightly knit group of supporters his family and above all Coleridge kept him true to his poetic vocation In the half century that followed his reputation was transformed His advocacy of the importance of imagination and feeling touched a chord in an increasingly industrial mechanistic age and his influence was profoundly and widely felt in every sphere of life In the last decade of his life Rydal Mount his home for thirty seven years became a place of pilgrimage not just for the great and powerful in Church and state but also touchingly for the hundreds of ordinary people who came to pay their respects to his genius In what is astonishingly the first biography of Wordsworth to treat the latter part of his life as fully as the first Juliet Barker balances meticulous research with a readable style and scrupulous objectivity with an understanding of her subject She reveals not only the public figure who was courted and reviled in equal measure but also the complex elusive private man behind that image Drawing on unpublished sources she vividly re creates the intimacy of Wordsworth s domestic circle showing the love laughter loyalty and tragedies that bound them together Far from being the remote cold solitary figure of legend Wordsworth emerges from his biography as a passionate vibrant man who lived for his family his poetry and his beloved Lakeland His legacy as a poet and as the spiritual founder of the conservation movement remains with us today WordsworthAn amazing deep account of possibly the greatest of the Romantic poets We all cut our teeth on The Daffodils at primary school There is so much to Wordsworth I have read much of his work over the years dip in and out of The Prelude and you get parts of his life in his own words Juliet Barker s extensive research fleshes out what we know about Wordsworth and emerges with an almost living three dimensional picture As a lifelong lover of the poetry of William Wordsworth a visit to Dove cottage with my family whilst on holiday in the Lake District in 2010 was a red letter day It was here that I bought the book Having read and enjoyed it immensely and it s one of those rare books one which you will keep treasure and re read I have moved on to Barker s The Brontes and look forward to reading other works by this author Wordsworth Reading through the family life and friends of William Wordsworth I wanted to find here on his poetry and the great romantic movement he helped to found Snippets of his poetry are inserted however and an exciting story is told of the tragic death of his brother Captain John Wordsworth as John s ship sank in an English harbor with feeble efforts at rescue from the nearby residents William Wordsworth appears in this biography as a responsible family man and productive poet than his free wheeling and opiate dependent friend Coleridge Wordsworth This is a readable and insightful biography Occasionally it gets down into the weeds of the poet s day to day activities than one might think it needs to and it also can be a tad jingoistic in spots especially when the author refuses to tolerate any of the likely justified criticisms of Wordsworth by American Ralph Waldo Emerson but on the whole I liked it very much Barker displays a comprehensive knowledge of Wordsworth s life and work with a fair evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the latter She follows his curious publishing career with helpful attention She also displays a great sensitivity to his family life and the tremendous importance it played for him The book is an elegantly written and engaging study which is not always the case with esteemed author biographies Wordsworth This took me close to a month to read because of life events I read about two chapters a day so that I could savour this biography. Wordsworth prelude What was most fascinating about this work was the way how Barker wrote about Wordsworth s relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge It started out as a mutual realationship that morphed into an odd parasitic one And in the end Wordsworth ended up supporting the Coleridge family to his dying day. History wordsworth tintern Thank you Juliet Barker for writing this book Wordsworth Truly enjoyed the prose style which made the 525 pages float along like a cloud This is probably the best full biography of Wordsworth superseding the one by expert Stephen Gill while incorporating and expanding the superb work by Johnston in The Hidden Wordsworth which unearthed the whole story of Wordsworth s illegitimate daughter in France during the French Revolution Although I feel Barker makes the same mistake of all Wordsworth biographies which is to gloss over or even apologize for his failings as a human being he is the Romantic poet I would probably least like to meet and that includes the superciliousness of Byron This is probably most apparent with how easily Coleridge is brushed away here and even simplistically given the literary eye roll at several points This is probably the Wordsworth biography with the least amount of time devoted to STC. Wordsworth kindle direct Nonetheless Wordsworth s poetry comes into tight focus with great integration into his life and I have never read a better account of how tightly Wordsworth was integrated into the Lake District which is of course the whole point of his poetry The story remains the same by the 1820s Wordsworth did little of lasting poetic value and his best work was behind him He abandoned his life project well before his death and admitted to a lack of poetic powers in his middle age Instead he returned to sonnet composition rather than the psychological epics of the mind and nature that he had innovated I see no reason not to believe his contemporaries who were disappointed in his conservatism in later years renouncing progressive policies that would have been at home in his early Revolution days His personal relationships are frankly bizarre He lived most of his life with his sister then his wife and then his daughter in a household that was centered around his wants and needs He prevented that daughter from marrying for quite some time ostensibly because he didn t like how it was handled but it is very hard to believe that it wasn t for selfish reasons When that daughter died he couldn t bring himself to attend the funeral He ruthlessly cut off friends who overstayed their welcome and their help to his career Coleridge is only one example and he left bad impressions with many of his associates I don t think he was a bad person but rather that his approach to poetry which enlarged the literary world was detrimental to personal interactions other than the most intimate familial ones He was a man trapped in his mind for better and for worse This accounts for the egoism he exuded in public literary occasions. Wordsworth famous poems For those who love Wordsworth s work but perhaps don t know much about his life this is a great place to start It will open your mind to some of his lesser known works Wordsworth
| Wordsworth By Juliet Barker |
| 0060787317 |
| 9780060787318 |
| English |
| 548 |
| Hardcover |
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