Volume 7, Number 11 · December 29, 1966
An Ugly Faced Man
By F.W. Bateson
William Wordsworth: The Later Years 1803-1850
by Mary Moorman
Oxford, 632 pp., $10.10
The Landscape of Memory
by Christopher Salvesen
University of Nebraska, 208 pp., $5.50
'Notes are often necessary, but they are necessary evils.' Samuel Johnson's rueful comment on his own heavily annotated edition of Shakespeare applies with an even greater force to any cradle-to-grave biography of an author. Unfortunately we cannot do without such aids to understanding. Faced with the six hundred pages of Mrs. Moorman's sequel to her William Wordsworth: The Early Years (which also ran to over six hundred pages) the stoutest devotee's heart is bound to quail a bit—especially as the special pleading of such recent critics as Edith Batho and John Jones has failed to convince most of us that Shelley and Arnold were wrong in thinking that after 1807 or so the poems get duller and duller. Still this dullness, even among the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, is a matter of degree. The fact is that Wordsworth, if he is to be taken at all, must be taken in toto. This child was the father of the man—and the dullard was also the son of the genius. Both of Mrs. Moorman's volumes are therefore indispensable, if only as extraordinarily comprehensive and reliable works of reference. Here are more facts about Wordsworth the man—who was also, though the coincidence sometimes strains our credulity, Wordsworth the poet—than have ever been packed before into a biography of him. And, since Wordsworth was the most autobiographical of English poets, facts about his daily life are what we need most of all to respond properly to what Keats, embellishing a phrase of Hazlitt's, called his 'egotistical sublime.'
Review, 1941 words
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