William Wordsworth. A life.

XVII, 525 S. Einband leicht berieben. - Anyone trying to construct a biography of Wordsworth faces a problem: the poet spent a lifetime sifting, selecting, and ordering much of the material for it himself. 'In truth my life has been unusually barren of events', he told Anne Taylor in 1801, formulating a useful untruth which he repeated thirty-six years later when parrying another probe with the remark that his life was 'bare of entertainment and interest'. He forbade Barron Field, an intelligent disciple, to publish his Memoirs of Wordsworth and was so appalled by the unauthorized use made of letters and recollections after Coleridge's death that he declared he hoped not a scrap of his own correspondence would survive. Even as he deflected biographical enquiry, however, Wordsworth was writing autobiography, not in the published poems, but in documents which remained unpublished until after his death, known only to his family and closest friends. There was the celebration of life with his sister Dorothy called Home at Grasmere. There were the notes on the whole canon of his poetry dictated in 1843, an impressively comprehensive attempt by an old man to bring together the work of a lifetime in one unifying review, and the autobiographical notes dictated to his nephew in 1847. Above all there was The Prelude.