William Wordsworth A Life Author:Stephen Gill Gill, tutor at Lincoln College, Oxford, has availed himself of the mass of recent Wordsworth scholarship, plus the large cache of the poet's family papers discovered in 1977, in producing this solid, intelligent and highly readable biography, which, while not neglecting Wordsworth as solitary visionary, brings out his determination to be an inte... more »llectual power in the land. Concentrating on Wordsworth the writer, Gill intersperses sensitive commentary on his poetic oeuvre, giving major attention to The Lyrical Ballads and The Prelude , with a running account of his family life, friendships and travels. His was a life containing much hardship heroically endured. Wordsworth's friendship with Coleridge, which helped inspire his early poetic blaze, gradually went sour; his poetry never earned him a livelihood and for 20 years was widely scorned; and the deaths of some of his closest friends and three of his children were stunning blows. Gill sends us back to the poetry with renewed interest, while enlarging our respect for the poet's rugged commitment to his muse. This biography by the editor (with Frank Kermode) of the Oxford Authors Series' William Wordsworth complements without superseding Mary Moorman's classic two-volume William Wordsworth . As he notes, the reader more interested in the domestic concerns of the Wordsworth household is still better off with Moorman. But Gill does a superb job of interrelating the life and work of this particularly autobiographical poet, and the years since Moorman's second volume (1965) have yielded many fresh approaches. Gill is revisionist in seeing Wordsworth's later years as part of the fabric and not as another, lesser garment, rejecting the popular notion that he became merely a tiresome old coot. Readable at once as pure biography, intellectual biography, and literary criticism, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in Wordsworth.« less