Trailing Clouds of Glory

...Equal weight is given by Barker to every incident, a system that prevents critical emphasis on any event or idea and results in a constant tonal register...

...Barker proffers every last detail of this situation, as well as other episodes, however slight...

...At William's death, the family drew a curtain over the affair that was not lifted until 1916...

...WE know more about the lives of those who lived in the 19th century than we do about those of any preceding century, largely because of written correspondence, the ease and volume of the post, and the cheapness of paper...

...He hovered on the margins of the French Revolution for a time and fathered a child with his French mistress, Annette Vallon...

...But 200 years after Wordsworth's prime there is an embarrassment of riches, and it poses a special problem that the biographer, or more likely her publisher, has failed to confront...

...Perhaps it is not Barker's purview, but by ignoring this aspect of her subject, she indirectly demeans the poetry...

...Mary and [daughter] Dora set off from Rydal Mount for Liverpool, where they stayed with the Crumps...

...At first glance, it seems aimed at the general reader (despite its grayish print and quotations in still smaller type...

...The book is replete with erudition, but the matters he cared about and on which his greatness rests were inward and are not easily described...

...The gratuitous, editorializing "astonishingly" is an unfortunate mark of Barker's style...

...A more selective use of the facts we currently possess—the"backstory"ofpoemsorevents— would have made for better flow and the opportunity for incisive judgments...

...Wordsworth inferred that his accomplishment was already supreme and his future reputation secure (if yet unacknowledged...

...Barker's method is to offer innumerable quotations from the poetry—and from letters and journals—making for a story told through "footnotes," a running commentary on the verse or on related particulars of the life...

...Mundane incidents unfold before the reader one after another, regardless of their importance, or lack thereof...

...The loss was staggering and double: first the death of John, then the huge sum, about £ 10,000, the Wordsworth family had loaned John for goods to sell in China—a treasure now gone forever...

...A fine poem is never merely the result of one nexus in time and space, and this creates a problem in evaluating Barker's biography...

...The Crumps and William Jackson, the former curate of Grasmere, accompanied them on the first stage of their journey, by steamboat from Penmaenmawr and by Puffin Island to Bangor, where they admired the 'stupendous preparations' for Thomas Telford's great suspension bridge linking Anglesey to the mainland across the Menai Straits...

...Affairs culminate with the sinking of an East India Company ship captained by William's younger brother John...

...These years also include some of Wordsworth's best writing...

...A panorama of detail extends the narrative to remarkable lengths...

...The blow struck after he had composed poems that are among the finest in the language—"Resolution and Independence," "Tis a beauteous evening, calm and free," "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality...

...his marriage to Mary Hutchinson...

...It is reductive, if entertaining, to frame the discussion of a poem with the precise local history that surrounded its composition and may even have given rise to it...

...Reviewed by Stephen Sandy Author, "Weathers Permitting,' "The Way of Things, a Poem" Today an international figure of popular culture, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) has survived while flashier personalities of the Romantic era have not...

...Sir George Beaumont's gift of property...

...Barker writes: "Next morning, he came upstairs to collect it and say goodbye...

...This doubtless steadied him in riding out the tumult of grief...

...and the death of James Lowther who, by procrastination, had prevented Wordsworth and his siblings from inheriting their due at their father's death...

...Typical of Barker's presentation is this passage: "On 24 August [1824] William...

...We need the biographer of Wordsworth to illuminate through interpretation and surmise the import of his exceptionally enmeshed life, genius and writings...

...The common reader would be justified in desiring to hear more about Benjamin Haydon's renowned "Immortal Dinner" in honor of John Keats on December 28,1817, than about Wordsworth massaging the feet of his bedridden daughter Dora years later...

...Recently I visited England's Lake District, haunt of Romantics from Wordsworth to Beatrix Potter...

...Since the early 20th century and beyond, mass use of the telephone, cell phone, email, and other sophisticated tools of communication have served to erase the quotidian accidents of our lives...

...The Red Lion Inn— once the abode of visiting scholars and proper Englishmen, where Wordsworth dined with Walter Scott—is now a Best Western...

...What resonates are not the facts of bookkeeping, £ 10 here or £20 there, but the spiritual and intellectual core that made Wordsworth the greatest poet of his century...

...Inevitably, the richest periods for a biographer are the most eventful ones in the subject's life—here the extraordinary years 1802-05...

...Wordsworth's significance in the history of English literature lies in his choice to make his own life the theme for an epic ("A tale from my own heart, more near akin/ To my own passions and habitual thoughts"), after rejecting traditional themes...

...A closer look at the text suggests it would be of more interest to academics (though the notes and bibliography in the unabridged have been eliminated...

...Friends and family knew of the liaison...

...It is not clear what audience Ecco's abridged version of Wordsworth: A Life is intended for...

...Seldom is there a sense, in one Wordsworth scholar's phrase, of the "poems as made objects...

...The exposition of his life demands discrimination...

...They began with the disintegration of the bond between Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose decline in health and plummeting spirits sparked their long disaffection...

...For example, it is tedious to quote, as Barker does, most of a lengthy 1802 letter from the poet to politician Charles James Fox...

...Yet there is almost prurience in the specifics relayed ofhis 1801 fever: "When [Coleridge] was eventually carried home in a chaise, he retired once more to his bed, this time with a swollen testicle which, astonishingly, responded to the application of three leeches and a home-made poultice of grated bread mixed up with a strong solution of lead...

...Such material Barker handles skillfully, and the reader avidly follows her...

...that Wordsworth wrote to a busy statesman defending his recently published Lyrical Ballads should speak for itself...

...Is this not a scene of utmost pathos, a determining crux in Wordsworth's emotional life, as he leaves his lifelong companion to join with another...

...John's death was a darkening loss that weighed on William heavily...

...He would not go near the sea for nearly 30 years...

...The donnée of this amplitude makes a biographer's job more difficult because (as Stephen Gill has noted) everyone must compete with the subject himself...

...One may chuckle at the abundance of specificity in what is certainly a trivial excursion...

...Countering family silence...

...Interpretation is missing...

...the birth of their first child...

...Not quite a Byronic figure, Wordsworth was nonetheless daring, and a determined radical in his youth...

...Similarly, that Coleridge suffered excruciating pain has never been doubted...

...At a momentous turning point, on the eve ofhis marriage to Mary Hutchinson, Wordsworth left the wedding ring for safekeeping with his beloved sister Dorothy, who wore it that night in bed...

...Poems, however, are not discussed as art in this volume...

...So it is no surprise that Juliet Barker's Wordsworth: A Life, originally published in Britain in 2000 and abridged the next year, has been issued in this country...

...What we have is a scholarly work masquerading as a popular one...

...It was the poet's interior life that was important and full—and, more to the point, was Wordsworth's main theme, particularly in the expansive The Prelude (1805...

...Busloads of Japanese tourists stood in line to tour Dove Cottage, famous among the poet's homes around Grasmere...

...The Scylla and Charybdis for a biographer of Wordsworth are, on one hand, the danger of providing only notes and comment to The Prelude and, on the other, keeping some profitable distance from Wordsworth's confessional mode...

...If he had not been so committed to his art, he might have faltered...

...In an oddly repellent gesture, which was clearly meant to be an endorsement ofhis continuing love for his sister, William slipped the ring back on her finger and blessed her 'fervently.'" But why should this be "repellent...

...Indeed, he has become an industry...

...Either way, the biographer risks offering interesting but finally useless helpings of contingent information—valuable from an academic perspective, but not central to throwing light on the peculiarly great and mysterious accomplishment of this man...