Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, 1787-1842 - Softcover

Wordsworth's Bardic Vocation, the most comprehensive critical study of the poet since the 1960s, presents the poet as balladist, sonneteer, minstrel, elegist, prophet of nature, and national bard. The book argues that Wordsworth's uniquely various oeuvre is unified by his sense of bardic vocation. Like Walt Whitman or the bards of Cumbria, Wordsworth sees himself as 'the people's remembrancer'. Like them, he sings of nature and endurance, laments the fallen, fosters national independence and liberty. His task is to reconcile in one society 'the living and the dead' and to nurture both 'the people' and 'the kind'. Review Comment: 'This erudite exposition, profligate with its ideas ... succeeds as few others have done in apprehending Wordsworth's career holistically, incorporating all its diversities and apparent inconsistencies into a unified vision. It justifies fully the notion proposed by Hughes and Heaney that he was England's last national poet.' - Duncan Wu, Review of English Studies

Richard Gravil is the author of Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776-1862 (Palgrave 2000), and Wordswoth and Helen Maria Williams, or the Perils of Sensibility (HEB 2010), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth (2015). He is Chairman of the Wordsworth Conference Foundation.