Radical Wordsworth

March 16, 2020
In this energetic literary biography, Bate (Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination), a senior research fellow at Oxford University, places William Wordsworth’s work in the context of his life. Bracingly candid about the superiority of Wordsworth’s early output to his later work (“I asked myself how could a poet who could be so good could also be so bad”), Bate makes a strong case that, when Wordsworth was good, he was transformative. Bate focuses on the poet’s early years: his troubled childhood, his devotion to—and then retreat from—French Revolution-era radicalism, and his passionate embrace of nature in lieu of politics. In Bate’s telling, Wordsworth’s relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who spurred him to great heights early on before falling out with him, is key to understanding Wordsworth’s uneven body of work. Bate spends less time on Wordsworth’s old age, when he became more conservative politically, less inspired, and, in the eyes of younger poets like Percy Shelley and John Keats, more fallible. Nonetheless, his “radical alternative religion of nature” cleared a path for later poets and philosophers, including the American transcendentalists. Appealingly conveying his own love of and frustrations with Wordsworth, Bate demonstrates in his delightful volume how, flaws and all, the poet “made a difference” in the way future generations would think and feel.