Wordsworth

Wordsworth. A life, the biography of the poet William Wordsworth written by Juliet Barker has been recently published in the US by Ecco Publishers (a division of Harper Collins). The book was first published in the UK in 2001.

From Publishers Weekly
Following Wordsworth over the course of his eight decades (1770–1850), Barker, unlike other biographers, gives equal attention to his early poetic career and radicalism, and to his "middle-aged Toryism" and later domestic years. As she did in The Brontës, Barker puts her subject in the context of his family: his early orphaning; his deep bond with his equally sensitive sister, Dorothy; and the tragic early deaths of his children. Apart from Wordsworth's enjoyment of the Lake District's inspiring landscape, he had a somewhat Dickensian upbringing among tightfisted relatives. Wordsworth's intelligence won him a place at Cambridge, which was intended to position him for the clergy, but his poetic calling and radicalization during the French Revolution determined otherwise. The English political circles in which the young Wordsworth moved introduced him to Coleridge, whose early inspiring friendship eventually deteriorated as the two poets' creative paths split (Barker underscores Coleridge's exasperating character). She is far more forgiving of Wordsworth's abandonment of his early ideology, sympathizing with his practical need as a family man to take a government job enforcing the press-restricting Stamp Act until he received a civil pension—and ultimately the laureateship. Although the U.S. version has been abridged slightly from the British edition, it amply displays Barker's painstaking scholarship

The Brontë connection is double. Not only because the author, Juliet Barker, is also the author of several capital books in the Brontë bibliography: The Brontës, or The Brontës. A life in letters. But also for the intense admiration that the Brontës felt by Wordsworth, the poet.

For instance, it is a well-known story that Charlotte Brontë wrote to Robert Southey in March 1837 asking for advice for her incipient literary career and the not-very-encouraging answer of the Poet Laureate. But it might not be so well-known that Branwell also asked for advice - in his case to William Wordsworth himself - at practically the same time (in January). Branwell sent him his poem "Still and bright, in twlight shining" telling him:

"Do pardon me, sir, that I have ventured to come before one whose works I have most loved in our literature, and who most has been with me a divinity of the mind, laying before him one of my writings, and asking of him a judgement of its contents. I mus come before some one from whose sentence there is no appeal; and such a one he who has developed the theory of poetry as well as its practice, and both in such a way as to claim a place in the memory of a thousand years to come." (quoting from Gérin, W. ,Branwell Brontë. A biography, p. 128)

Branwell didn't receive an answer. Some years later he was more fortunate getting in touch with Hartley Coleridge.

Categories: Books, Biography