By examining the family and financial circumstances of
Wordsworth’s early years, this illuminating biography
reshapes our understanding of the great Romantic poet’s most
creative period of life and writing.
* Features new research into Wordsworth’s financial
situation, and into how the poet and his family survived
financially
* Offers a new understanding of the role of his great unwritten
poem ‘The Recluse’
* Presents a new assessment of the relationship between
Wordsworth and Coleridge
สารบัญ
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments x
Abbreviations and Texts xii
Foreword: ‘The Prelude’: A Poem of My Own Life? xvii
Part I Early Years 1
1 Versions of Home: 1770-83 3
2 Hawkshead and Esthwaite: 1783-7 18
3 Cambridge: 1787-90 37
4 To the Alps: and What Followed: 1790-1 53
5 Annette Vallon, Michel de Beaupuy, and the Bishop of Llandaff: 1791-3 69
Part II Writer 91
6 Salisbury Plain and its Consequences: 1793-5 93
7 Racedown: 1795-7 113
8 Coleridge and Alfoxton: 1797-8 135
9 Lyrical Ballads: 1798 157
10 Hamburg to the Harz: 1798 173
11 Writing in Goslar: 1798-9 183
12 Sockburn to Grasmere: 1799-1800 198
Part III Town-End 213
13 ‘Home at Grasmere, ‘ the ‘Ode, ‘ ‘Michael’: 1800-1 215
14 Hurting: 1800-1 241
15 Marrying: 1801-2 249
16 Grasmere to Calais and on to Gallow Hill: 1802 265
17 Marriage, First Child, and the Trip to Scotland: 1802-3 284
18 ‘The Prelude’ I: 1804 303
19 ‘The Prelude’ II: 1804-5 315
20 ‘Elegiac Stanzas, ‘ Poems, in Two Volumes: 1806-7 328
Part IV The Light of Common Day 341
21 ‘The Recluse’ and The Convention of Cintra: 1808-9 343
22 Loss and Grief: 1809-12 356
23 Stamp-officer and Poet of The Excursion: 1812-14 368
24 ‘What though it be past’: 1814 387
Part V Sketches of Late Years 397
25 Poetry, Family, and Polemic: 1815-18 399
26 Peter Bell and ‘the ghosts of what they were’: 1819-26 407
27 ‘The Recluse’ and ‘The Prelude’: 1827-33 418
28 The Past Enshrined: 1834-42 429
29 No Resting Place: 1843-50 439
Afterword 447
Bibliography 451
Index 457
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JOHN WORTHEN is Emeritus Professor, University of Nottingham, UK. His books include The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2010), Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician (2007), D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (2005), The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths in 1802 (2001), and D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 (1991).