{"product_id":"wordsworth-a-life-in-letters-9780670872145","title":"Wordsworth: A Life In Letters","description":"\u003cp\u003eWilliam Wordsworths early life reads like a novel. Orphaned at a young age and dependent on the charity of unsympathetic relatives  he became the archetypal teenage rebel. Refusing to enter the Church  he went instead to Revolutionary France  where he fathered an illegitimate daughter and became a committed Republican. His poetry was as revolutionary as his politics  challenging convention in form  style  and subject  and earning him the universal derision and contempt of critics. Only the unfailing encouragement of a tightly knit group of supporters  his family  and  above all  Coleridge kept him true to his poetic vocation. In the half-century that followed his reputation was transformed. His advocacy of the importance of imagination and feeling touched a chord in an increasingly industrial  mechanistic age  and his influence was profoundly and widely felt in every sphere of life. In the last decade of his life  Rydal Mount  his home for thirty-seven years  became a place of pilgrimage  not just for the great and powerful in Church and state  but also  more touchingly  for the hundreds of ordinary people who came to pay their respects to his genius. In what is  astonishingly  the first biography of Wordsworth to treat the latter part of his life as fully as the first  Juliet Barker balances meticulous research with a readable style  and scrupulous objectivity with an understanding of her subject. She reveals not only the public figure who was courted and reviled in equal measure but also the complex  elusive  private man behind that image. Drawing on unpublished sources  she vividly re-creates the intimacy of Wordsworths domestic circle  showing the love  laughter  loyalty  and tragedies that bound them together. Far from being the remote  cold  solitary figure of legend  Wordsworth emerges from his biography as a passionate  vibrant man who lived for his family  his poetry  and his beloved Lakeland. His legacy  as a poet and as the spiritual founder of the conservation movement  remains with us today.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45651819528245,"sku":"ByrdShop_0670872148","price":182.24,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780670872145.jpg?v=1781841022","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/wordsworth-a-life-in-letters-9780670872145","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}