The Age Of Wordsworth

Since Its First Publication In February 1897 Herford S The Age Of Wordsworth Has Remained And Continues To Remain A Basic Book On European Romanticism In General And The English Romanticism In Particular. The Second Edition Was Printed In The Same Year A Few Months Later, In November 1897, And The Third Edition (Revised) Was Brought Out In The Year 1899. Since Then The Book Has Been Reprinted Many Times, And That Is A Standing Testimony To The Immense Popularity And Usefulness Of The Book.In The Preface To The First Edition Herford Wrote In December 1895, About A Year Before The Actual Publication Of The Book: The Task Of Presenting This Vast And Complex Literature With Some Semblance Of Order And Unity Has Been No Light One. But The Enormous Popularity Of The Book For Over A Century Is A Glowing Testimony To His Remarkable Success In Performing The Arduous Task He Had Set Upon Himself. His Analysis Of Romanticism, Which Is The Organizing Conception Of This Book Is As Sharp As It Is Illuminating And Offers A Clear Idea Of The Various Phases Of European Romanticism, A Movement That Swept Over Europe From Roughly The Middle Of The Eighteenth Century To The Middle Of The Nineteenth Century. What Deserves Special Mention Is The Fact That All Along Herford Assiduously Maintains The Distinction Between Literary History And Biography.While The Book Is Indispensable For Any Student Of English Literature, The Students Of The History Of Thought And Culture Studies Will Also Find This Luminous Book Delightfully Readable And Interesting.

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Many editions of William Wordsworth's mature work are available but general readers have never before had access to the poetry he wrote during his school and university years. This selection from the poetry he composed between 1785 and 1790 reveals him to have been remarkably accomplished from an early age and shows that from the time he began to write he was already preoccupied with precisely the themes that would later be explored more fully in The Prelude, the great poem of his maturity. The Earliest Poems offers a unique opportunity to examine something normally withheld from our gaze: the apprenticeship of a great writer. Duncan Wu's introduction and his comprehensive notes guide the reader through versions of Wordsworth's work to show how he graduated from the early experimentation of pieces such as 'Beauty and Moonlight' to An Evening Walk, an impressive poem of over 600 lines which was published in 1793. This book spans the first five years of Wordsworth's career, revealing how the traumas of his early life forged his vision and produced the sensibility that would make him a most gifted celebrant of the human spirit. In effect, they also chronicle the evolution of British Romanticism out of the aesthetic morass of the late eighteenth century. Book jacket.

The Spirit of the Age (full title The Spirit of the Age: Or, Contemporary Portraits) is a collection of character sketches by the early 19th century English essayist, literary critic, and social commentator William Hazlitt, portraying 25 men, mostly British, whom he believed to represent significant trends in the thought, literature, and politics of his time. The subjects include thinkers, social reformers, politicians, poets, essayists, and novelists, many of whom Hazlitt was personally acquainted with or had encountered. Originally appearing in English periodicals, mostly The New Monthly Magazine in 1824, the essays were collected with several others written for the purpose and published in book form in 1825. The Spirit of the Age was one of Hazlitt's most successful books. It is frequently judged to be his masterpiece, even "the crowning ornament of Hazlitt's career, and ... one of the lasting glories of nineteenth-century criticism." Hazlitt was also a painter and an art critic, yet no artists number among the subjects of these essays. His artistic and critical sensibility, however, infused his prose style-Hazlitt was later judged to be one of the greatest of English prose stylists as well-enabling his appreciation of portrait painting to help him bring his subjects to life. His experience as a literary, political, and social critic contributed to Hazlitt's solid understanding of his subjects' achievements, and his judgements of his contemporaries were later often deemed to have held good after nearly two centuries. The Spirit of the Age, despite its essays' uneven quality, has been generally agreed to provide "a vivid panorama of the age". Yet, missing an introductory or concluding chapter, and with few explicit references to any themes, it was for long also judged as lacking in coherence and hastily thrown together. More recently, critics have found in it a unity of design, with the themes emerging gradually, by implication, in the course of the essays and even supported by their grouping and presentation. William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 - 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.