Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World
JONATHAN BATE
(WILLIAM COLLINS, 608 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

The Wordsworth family celebrated Christmas 1806 with two guests: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William’s sister-in-law, Sara Hutchinson. Over a dozen nights, Wordsworth read aloud his newly finished masterpiece, dedicated to Coleridge, “The Prelude”. But Coleridge was in torment, believing that Hutchinson – with whom he was deeply in love – was having an affair with Wordsworth. Rushing from the house, he found shelter in a pub, where he poured out his feelings on three pages of a notebook, which would later be torn out and destroyed.

Jonathan Bate takes this dramatic scene as the starting point for his epic biography, published to mark the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Wordsworth’s birth. It was a crucial moment for both poets: the beginning of the end of their mutually inspiring friendship. Had Wordsworth died then – at 36, like Byron – he would now share the glamour of the younger Romantics. Instead, he lived for another 44 years, writing little of value and embracing conservative politics. It is this tired figure, sketched by Benjamin Robert Haydon, who adorns the cover of another anniversary publication, Stephen Gill’s impressive revised biography (William Wordsworth: A Life, OUP, £25). Bate’s aim is to banish thoughts of “the longest, dullest decline in literary history” and resurrect Wordsworth as a young revolutionary.