Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World
The Poet Who Changed the World
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Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Keeble
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By:
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Jonathan Bate
About this listen
A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020
‘Radical Wordsworth deserves to take its place as the finest modern introduction to his work, life and impact’ Financial Times
‘Richly repays reading … It is hard to think of another poet who has changed our world so much’ Sunday Times
A dazzling new biography of Wordsworth’s radical life as a thinker and poetical innovator, published to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth.
William Wordsworth wrote the first great poetic autobiography. We owe to him the idea that places of outstanding natural beauty should become what he called ‘a sort of national property’. He changed forever the way we think about childhood, about the sense of the self, about our connection to the natural environment, and about the purpose of poetry.
He was born among the mountains of the English Lake District. He walked into the French Revolution, had a love affair and an illegitimate child, before witnessing horrific violence in Paris. His friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at the core of the Romantic movement. As he retreated from radical politics and into an imaginative world within, his influence would endure as he shaped the ideas of thinkers, writers and activists throughout the nineteenth century in both Britain and the United States. This wonderful book opens what Wordsworth called ‘the hiding places of my power’.
W. H. Auden once wrote that ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’. He was wrong. Wordsworth’s poetry changed the world. Award-winning biographer and critic Jonathan Bate tells the story of how it happened.
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Critic reviews
Shortlisted for Lakeland Book of the Year 2021
‘An entertaining biography … Excellent, intellectually rousing’
The Times
‘This new book, like everything Bate writes, richly repays reading … He is illuminating on the sources of Wordsworth’s nature worship … He carefully and persuasively re-examines the effects of the revolution on Wordsworth … Bate shows that it was Wordsworth who inspired the founders of the National Trust … It is hard to think of another poet who has changed our world so much’
Sunday Times
‘A bold and bracing account, masterful with its material, patiently brilliant in reading the poems, and gloriously convincing about its subject’s social significance’
Daily Telegraph
‘Bate’s stirring biography … is neither rushed nor reductive. It is full of sharp anecdotes that evoke the lives of the Wordsworths … Bate is able to set the poetry amid the personal’
Spectator
‘A pacy writer and doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to Wordsworth’s later poetry … When he was at his best, Bate says, his poems were as powerful as any since Shakespeare and they ‘uphold and feed’ the spirit of anyone who reads them’ Daily Mail
‘As when a conservator carefully swabs away from an oil painting the crusty accretions and gunk of ages to reveal shining colours and unexpected detail – so Jonathan Bate sets about the youthful Wordsworth, and shows us, page by page, just how world-changing he really was … With wonderful elan, close reading and detective work, Bate blows the chalk-dust away’ Kathleen Jamie,New Statesman
‘Bate is a supremely capable guide, steeped in the poet’s work and milieu … Radical Wordsworth deserves to take its place as the finest modern introduction to his work, life and impact’ Financial Times
‘[A] marvellous new biography of Wordsworth … Exhilarating … his inspiriting fleet-footed book …embroiders together life, poetry and landscape with such dexterity’
Observer
Largely entertaining, however some of the claims's
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Jonathan Bates takes us through Wordsworth’s life highlighting significant points that contributed to his development as a person and as a writer. This is a fascinating story that sets the personal and historical background to Wordsworth’s output. Excerpts from Wordsworth are read in a distinctly northern accent, an audible reminder of where this nationally acclaimed poet came from..
I found the account of Wordsworth’s boyhood and youth of particular interest. Having read this book I have a much better understanding of the context of Wordsworth’s early work. I loved learning about his friendships with other poets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, and the politics of getting work published, and the placement of works within a published volume. I could relate to Wordsworth’s travels as a student, whilst on long vacation from St Johns College Cambridge, and I never knew before about his affair in France, that produced a daughter. The depth and quality of Wordsworth’s personal family relationships was fully explored, notably the love of his sister, who was brought up separately from him for a decade following the death of his parents, only reunited again in Wordsworth’s early twenties. Facts like his younger brother Christopher eventually becoming the Master of Trinity College Cambridge show what an extraordinarily high achieving family the Wordsworths were. The impact on Wordsworth of the French Revolution, and his travels around England, particularly the Wye Valley, also extended periods living in Sussex, Leicester and Somerset, place him geographically not quite as narrowly as I had once thought.
When I was about 8 I picked up a slim volume at a book sale entitled The Prelude. It was bound in soft burgundy leather, and I loved it. I longed to know more about the poet that experienced nature so intensely. Now I do.
The closing chapters of this book consider how Wordsworth shaped the thinking of subsequent generations, including the likes of Beatrix Potter and Matthew Arnold. It explores how our view of the natural world was transformed by Wordsworth’s early poetry and led to movements to preserve and protect it. The creation of a national park in America was inspired by Wordsworth, also the idea of the Lake District, leading to an influx of tourists that has never been reversed and that transformed the economy of this beautiful region
Darwin’s The Origin of Species, coincided with a withdrawal of faith in God and led people, including Freud, to explore the idea that union with nature could provide a quasi religious experience as intense and moving as that derived from any conventional religious belief system. The impact of Wordsworth’s beliefs and poetry in our lives is shown to be immense. I feel inspired to re-read the poetry of Wordsworth and his contemporaries with renewed insight.
This is a book I think I will return to again and again.
Wordsworth explained
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Romantic Disillusionment
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Absorbing but unfortunately accented
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One of the worst audiobooks
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