Wordsworth: A Life

William Wordsworth's early life reads like a novel. Orphaned at a young age and dependent on the charity of unsympathetic relatives, he became the archetypal teenage rebel. Refusing to enter the Church, he went instead 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 universal derision and contempt of critics. Only the unfailing encouragement of a tightly knit group of supporters, his family and, above all, Coleridge, kept him true to his poetic vocation.