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Wordsworth: a Life

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Adam Kirsch writing in the 'New Yorker' reports that this biography does an outstanding job in covering the details of Wordsworth's everyday life. It contrasts with other biographies in giving equal focus to the long years after he had written his great works.

Kirsch finds the book's limitation is that it gives equal time and attention to a host of Wordsworth's activities while not focusing on his Poetry. For the Poetry is what makes Wordsworth important to us today, and not the long, and rather dull life story.

Wordsworth's radical youth, when it was bliss to be alive, and to be young was very heaven, his travels to France, his love- affair with Annette Vallon, the birth of his daughter all are in the background of the great decade of poetic work begun in the 1790's. Kirsch maintains that this great period of writing is one in which Wordsworth is still between worlds, torn by his disillusionment with the French Revolution. It is a time before he settles into being the Tory conservative, and eventually respected and admired poet laureate of England.

The greatness of Wordsworth which Kirsch sees in great part as connected with a kind of democratic religious vision in which he sees into , sympathizes with and portrays the kind of ordinary and not - so- ordinary souls outside the realm of previous English poetry comes to a climax in this period of uncertainty.

Wordsworth's special connection with Nature, the whole sublime and yet deeply passionate and calm tone of his greatest poetry provide a kind of consoling religious vision for many of his great and devoted readers. These include Emerson, and most especially John Stuart Mill .Mill's account in his 'Autobiography' of being saved from his terrible depression and loss of the sense of meaning of his own life, through his reading of Wordsworth is one telling example of how powerful the effect of Wordsworth's poetry.

This biography according to Kirsch gives detailed insight into all of Wordsworth's closest relations, including what is one of the most remarkable and productive literary friendships of all time, Wordsworth's close connection with Coleridge.

For all students of Wordsworth, for all those who would know his life in the most detailed way possible this work is indispensable.