Word: wordsworth
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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THERE has long been a need for a biography of the woman who influenced in such a remarkable way the poetry and lives of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Dorothy Wordsworth. Until the appearance of this volume, she has only been treated as a deuteragonist in the lives of the other two. But here she at last receives the importance and justice...
...Dorothy Wordsworth did not have an eventful life, she never travelled much, and she was seldom in London. Her story is of the small details of life in the country and the short excursions and walks she and William and Samuel Coleridge would make of impressions of the fugitive beauty of a scene, or of the way the leafless branches looked against the moon. These Mrs. MacLean has gleaned from the voluminous Journal and the letters, and presented them so that they give a vivid impression of Dorothy's life and personality...
Basically Professor Babbitt's criticism is the same as it was some years ago, but Mencken is out of fashion, and his remarks mean far less to the contemporary student and critic than Professor Babbitt would have us believe. Essays on the primitivism of Wordsworth, on Coleridge and Dr. Johnson and the imagination, are studies more immediately interesting to the student of literature. Professor Lowes comes in for his share of criticism in the former essay, and Professor Carpenter is nicked once in the course of the book. All in all, however, they fare better than do Rebecca West...
Shakespeare was the first of the poets to turn his footsteps in imagination to the stones of Venice. After him a long procession follows, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Browning. One may almost say that the best of the English poets are those who loved Venice best. The delight of Shelley in it was that of Ariel for his island, and Byron's love was not one but several. For those who can go and see, the record of their attachment is alive in Venice today. For those who cannot, Mr. Hersey will lecture on "Venice and the English Poets," illustrated...
...pointed out the Harvard CRIMSON, especially in its Student Vagabond, has performed a valuable service, on the side of eulogy, in calling the auditor's attention to stimulating lectures which otherwise he might have missed. On one occasion last autumn, the Vagabond, after confessing his own inability to enjoy Wordsworth, announced that Mr. Lowes would lecture on the gentleman that morning. No one who heard the superb analysis of the Westmoreland poet, and later the reading of the Immortality Ode, would deny that the more undergraduates who care for beautiful letters, throng the benches of English 72, the better...