Writing the Literary Life

Abstract

Since his death in 1850, Wordsworth’s life has been written many times. Modern scholarship has revealed the considerable extent to which Wordsworth rewrote and edited his own autobiography in The Prelude between 1799 and 1850, and what biographers have made of the raw material since has varied a good deal. The account this book offers portrays a man who seems to have spent at least the first forty or so years of his life working against the grain. He worked against the wishes and aspirations of those who, with both his parents dead, took on the task of supporting him through school and university. As a young man he identified with the political beliefs of those who were prepared to challenge and work against the political establishment of the day. As a poet he identified early on with contemporary trends, and began to write in ways specifically designed to challenge orthodox literary conventions, producing in consequence poetry guaranteed to make a reading public for his work hard to establish and retain.