Radical Wordsworth

The Poet Who Changed the World

By: Jonathan Bate

Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble

Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020.

A dazzling new biography of Wordsworth’s radical life as a thinker and poetical innovator, published to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth.

William Wordsworth wrote the first great poetic autobiography. We owe to him the idea that places of outstanding natural beauty should become what he called ‘a sort of national property’. He changed forever the way we think about childhood, about the sense of the self, about our connection to the natural environment and about the purpose of poetry.

He was born among the mountains of the English Lake District. He walked into the French Revolution and had a love affair and an illegitimate child before witnessing horrific violence in Paris. His friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at the core of the Romantic movement. As he retreated from radical politics and into an imaginative world within, his influence would endure as he shaped the ideas of thinkers, writers and activists throughout the 19th century in both Britain and the United States. This wonderful book opens what Wordsworth called ‘the hiding places of my power’.

W. H. Auden once wrote that ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’. He was wrong. Wordsworth’s poetry changed the world. Award-winning biographer and critic Jonathan Bate tells the story of how it happened.

©2020 Jonathan Bate (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

"Radical Wordsworth deserves to take its place as the finest modern introduction to his work, life and impact." (Financial Times)

"Richly repays reading.... It is hard to think of another poet who has changed our world so much." (Sunday Times)

"An entertaining biography.... Excellent, intellectually rousing." (The Times)

An Oxford Don's Mega Rant

Radical Wordsworth was an average, okay listen. Sorry, but it was not intellectually mind blowing. Yes, Johnathan Keeble does an interestingly terrible Dorothy Wordsworth performance, and Bate will provide you with a good overview of Romanticism, its philosophical and continental origins, Wordsworth's poetry, and why Wordsworth remains important today, although he does go into overkill when it comes to WW's greatness, and his thesis that WW's later poetry sucked because he started getting laid seemed to be lacking in evidence. But the book felt a little skittish, as there was no consistent theme or focus, but segments of what i would describe as "mega rant": an incessant shower of intellectual waffle redolent of some ugly academic bird's squawking. Nevertheless, I would still recommend this title to an aspiring undergraduate student of English Literature or to Prince Charles. By this i mean to say it is a bit of an upper class English white man who went to Oxford kind of book, so if you are out there Prince and not playing polo, you should read this book. More seriously though, i found the structure of this book to be a little disjointed, repetitive and rambling in areas. It could have done with some editing, as the style of writing is very much redolent of lecture notes translated into thematic chapters, and while fresh in areas, much of the content was tired. It was one of those books that probably got published because of the author's status, and not because of the book's exceptional quality.