Wordsworth, A Life

Gill, Stephen, William Wordsworth, A Life, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, OUP, 1989)

There are a number of biographies of Wordsworth available ranging from Hunter Davis's popular portrait of the poet published in 1981, to John Worthen's The Life of William Wordsworth: a Critical Biography, published by Wiley only last month. Given Wordsworth's long life and prodigious output unsurprisingly many of his biographers choose to focus on a particular aspect of his life and work. Davis presents Wordsworth as primarily a poet of 'The Lakes'; Worthen explores Wordsworth's early years at Grasmere in more detail than his later life, and looks in detail at the influence of financial circumstances on his work; other critics such as Duncan Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life, (2003) take a particular theme - such as grief, in this case - and make it a focus for extensive critical analysis. For reasons of completeness, balance and breadth of scholarship then Stephen Gill's biography published in 1989  remains the most comprehensive treatment of the subject to date.

Gill tries, as far as possible, to give equal weighting to each period of Wordsworth's life. This is particularly useful for a researcher who is interested in overlooked areas of Wordsworth's work and is seeking biographical detail pertaining to  periods that are often dismissed as less productive or interesting. The three chapters covering 1806 - 1822 proved particularly useful in tracing the circumstances and influences in the years preceding Wordsworth's publication of the Duddon Sonnets in 1820. In particular the material relating to the (largely hostile)  reaction to the publication of The Excursion (1814) and the first Collected Edition (1815) encourage less experienced researchers to read Wordsworth's Preface and Afterword of 1815 with a wiser, more critical  eye.

Indeed, Gill's explanation of his approach as a biographer of Wordsworth to be found in his brief introduction provides sound advice for anyone seeking to relate the poet's work to his life. Wordsworth, perhaps, is the most autobiographical of all major poets, he used his life experience as the raw material of his work. What Gill recognises is that Wordsworth was his own unreliable narrator. Partly this is due to the primary audience, for the Prelude at least, was not posterity, but the poet himself. It is ' a song of myself'' written long before Whitman's foray into the similar territory. Moreover, as Gill points out, it is not merely the intentionality that presents challenges for the biographer, but also Wordsworth's habit of revising his poems throughout his long life, incorporating previous 'snippets' of autobiography into longer works, moving sections from book to book, and then re-framing the text in a new philosophical context. For Gill, the life experiences that Wordsworth recounts in his work cannot be taken at face value, but must be set against the extensive letters and  other archive material that exist for Wordsworth's family, friends and contemporaries.

The extensive scholarship which underlies Gill's biography enables Wordsworth's achievements and failures to be better understood in the context of the time. Wordsworth's 'conservatism'  from middle age onwards is better understood in the context of simply having to 'make ends meet'. His 'radical pastoralism'  can only be appreciated though knowledge of his everyday involvement in the life of a rural community. What this biography encourages scholars to do is consider Wordsworth's work in a historical context. The contradictions, apparent lapses of quality, and complexities that face any critic of Wordsworth become more understandable; moreover, detailed biography provides an antidote to the temptation to corral aspects of his work as representative of a particular ideology, or simply to accept then re-iterate Shelley's frustration at the maturer Wordsworth, as someone who simply recanted on the radicalism of his youth.