Wordsworth : a life / Juliet Barker.

Includes index.

The child is father of the man pre; 1770-83 -- A poor, devoted crew; 1784-7 -- Squandered abroad; 1787-90 -- A vital interest; 1799-92 -- A patriot of the world; 1793-4 -- Benighted heart and mind; 1794-6 -- A sett of violent democrats; 1796-8 -- The giant Wordsworth; 1798-9 -- The concern; 1799-1800 -- Home at Grasmere; 1800-1802 -- The set is broken; 1802-5 -- Acquiring the quiet mind; 1805-6 -- The convention of cintra; 1807-9 -- The blessedest of men! ; 1809-11 -- Suffer the little children; 1811-12 -- The excursion; 1813-14 -- Increasing influence; 1814-16 -- Bombastes Furioso; 1817-20 -- A tour of the continent; 1820-22 -- Idle Mount; 1823-6 -- Shades of the prison-house; 1826-9 -- Furiously alarmist; 1829-33 -- Falling leaves; 1833-6 -- Coming home; 1836-9 -- Real greatness; 1893-42 -- Poet Laureate; 1842-5 -- Fixed and irremovable grief; 1845-7 -- Bowed to the dust; 1847-50 -- Epilogue; 1847-50.

Orphaned and dependent on the charity of unsympathetic relatives, Wordsworth became the archetypal teenage rebel. He went to Revolutionary France, where he fathered an illegitimate daughter and became a committed republican. His poetry was as revolutionary as his politics, challenging convention in form, style, and subject, and earning him the contempt of critics. Only the encouragement of a group of supporters, above all Coleridge, kept him true to his poetic vocation. In the half-century that followed, his reputation was transformed. His advocacy of imagination and feeling touched a chord in an increasingly industrial, mechanistic age, and his influence was profoundly felt in every sphere of life. In the last decade of his life, his home became a place of pilgrimage for people who came to pay their respects to his genius. His legacy, as a poet and as the spiritual founder of the conservation movement, remains with us today.--From publisher description.