Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World
By Jonathan Bate
Yale University Press, 2020

People tend to think of Wordsworth in terms of Benjamin Robert Haydon’s famous 1842 painting: the bald, beak-nosed old seer, arms folded defensively, head bowed in a kind of sleepy sadness - a black-garbed figure stooped against a black-clouded background. Far less familiar is William Shuter’s 1798 portrait: a ruddy-faced young striver with bright lips, fashionable neckwear, one hand tucked Napoleon-style into his coat. This is a Wordsworth who might quarrel with you over a tankard of ale. This is a Wordsworth who might laugh uproariously at a slightly bawdy joke. This is a Wordsworth who doesn’t yet know nor even remotely dream that he will one day become Wordsworth.

That younger Wordsworth, half a century before the seer, stares out from the US cover of Jonathan Bate’s thrillingly good new book, Radical Wordsworth, and it serves as a quick introduction to the Wordsworth readers will encounter in these pages. The familiar challenge in writing any Wordsworth biography is the well-known divide between the front and back halves of his life; the seeming discrepancy tends to daunt because it forms an almost ridiculous temptation to oversimplify. We may be in for a fair bit of that kind of oversimplification, since 2020 marks a Wordsworth anniversary - 250 years since his birth in 1770 - and the publishing is well-known for its inability to ignore anniversaries. 

Bate is a renowned scholar and a first-rate biographer, and Radical Wordsworth breathes with exactly the kind of relaxed authority that’s always made his books a joy to read. He writes his account of the young firebrand Wordsworth, the French Revolution Wordsworth, with one portion of his attention fixed on the older Wordsworth, the bland, benign specter who tends to hover over life studies of this figure: 

As he settled into fame and a gentleman’s life at Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s genius deserted him. Yet as his mortal powers waned, he began to achieve immortality: his spirit lived on by means of his inspiration upon the next generation of readers and writers, then far beyond. To use another phrase of W. H. Auden’s in his elegy on the death of W. B. Yeats, Wordsworth became his admirers. 

Bate writes about the younger Wordsworth with an immediate sympathy that fills the narrative with urgent letters, urgent book-reading, and urgent friendships of all kinds. It’s an account remarkably unhaunted by that older, more placid Wordsworth, a faded figure Bate describes in appealingly personal terms:

He was always a mountaineer, so perhaps the conquest of some vast peak is the best metaphor for his life story. Imagine it as thirty-six years of arduous but exhilarating ascent to the summit that was reached with the completion and reading aloud of the epic work that he called his ‘Poem to Coleridge’ and that his family would publish as The Prelude. After a moment of rest, there would be forty-four years of crawling descent. Any fell-walker will tell you that the joy of downward journey comes from its speed - as a young man I used to run down the scree slopes, footpaths and sheep-mown grass of Wordsworth’s native hills. There is nothing more boring than a gradual decline. So it is that the long life of Wordsworth tails off into monotony. 

Regardless of what any reader might think of that monotony - regardless of whether or not that reader thinks the monotony happened at all - in Radical Wordsworth the exhilarating ascent now has a biographical account that matches its passion.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.