William Wordsworth - The Story of His Life, With Critical Remarks on His Writings - Paperback

by James Middleton Sutherland (Author)

The life behind Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth from Hawkshead schoolboy to Poet Laureate, told by a Victorian biographer with a close ear for the verse itself.

James Middleton Sutherland published William Wordsworth with Elliot Stock of London in 1887, thirty-seven years after the poet's death. He follows William Wordsworth (1770-1850) from his birth at Cockermouth and his schooldays at Hawkshead, through Cambridge and a young man's enthusiasm for revolutionary France, to the Dorset and Somerset years he shared with his sister Dorothy and the friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge that produced Lyrical Ballads in 1798.

From there the story settles in the Lakes: Dove Cottage at Grasmere, marriage in 1802, the move to Rydal Mount in 1813, the later decades of honours and losses, the laureateship of 1843, and the grave in Grasmere churchyard. A closing chapter turns from the life to the work, taking the measure of Wordsworth's poetry and quoting generously from the lines themselves.

This edition features:

• A complete life in thirteen chapters, from Cockermouth and Hawkshead to the grave at Grasmere
• The making of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and the friendship with Coleridge that lay behind it
• A closing chapter of critical remarks on the poetry, with generous quotation from the verse itself
• First published in 1887 and reset here in a clear modern edition
• A fitting companion for readers of the Romantic poets and for visitors to the Lake District

Ragged Hand is proud to present this classic life of one of the great poets in English, for readers who return to the verse and want to know the man who made it.