Radical Wordsworth, Jonathan Bate
Radical Wordsworth, Jonathan Bate
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Radical Wordsworth
The Poet Who Changed the World

Author: Jonathan Bate

Narrator: Matthew Waterson

Unabridged: 14 hr 5 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/30/2020


Synopsis

On the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth's birth comes a highly imaginative and vivid portrait of a revolutionary poet who embodied the spirit of his age.

Published in time for the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth's birth, this is the biography of a great poetic genius, a revolutionary who changed the world. Wordsworth rejoiced in the French Revolution and played a central role in the cultural upheaval that we call the Romantic Revolution.

He and his fellow Romantics changed forever the way we think about childhood, the sense of the self, our connection to the natural environment, and the purpose of poetry. But his was also a revolutionary life in the old sense of the word, insofar as his art was of memory, the return of the past, the circling back to childhood and youth. This beautifully written biography is purposefully fragmentary, momentary, and selective, opening up what Wordsworth called "the hiding-places of my power."

About Jonathan Bate

Jonathan Bate is foundation professor of environmental humanities at Arizona State University and a senior research fellow at Oxford University, where he was formerly provost of Worcester College.


Reviews

For a few days of the sunny May lockdown sitting in my garden I was totally engrossed in Jonathan Bate’s new biography of William Wordsworth. I did however take timeout to watch Jonathan talk about the book at the Hay Festival Digital. In spite of regarding the Lake District as my spiritual home and......more

Goodreads review by Paul

It was good to be taken back to ‘The Prelude’ and the Lake District. It brought back memories of all those weekends I spent wandering through the Lakes in my teens and twenties. It was also good to be reminded of Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time’, which drew out my own spots of time – those brief moments......more

Goodreads review by Britta

Read for the BooktubePrize / Nonfiction Octofinals Wordsworth-fans (which I'm not) might love this, but I found it rather boring. 2.5*......more

Goodreads review by Stephen

Jonathan Bate’s biography of Wordsworth does exactly what it says on the cover - it makes a very strong case for Wordsworth as a radical poet and philosopher, but goes one step further and sees him as a huge influence on modern environmental movements and the setting up of institutions like the Nati......more