how to: Read Wordsworth | how to: Academy

‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, William Wordsworth famously wrote, yet for the modern reader a romp through his rich romantic verse can be just as alienating as directionless as a wandering cloud. 

Wordsworth revolutionised the staid state of Augustan poetry with the radical shift towards nature, simplicity and the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’. But, despite the clear manifesto Wordsworth penned in his preface to Lyrical Ballads and its influence upon literary thinking thereafter, Romanticism is peppered with complications and contradictions. And Wordsworth’s genius shifts and develops, from a bold, revolutionary gusto to his more reflective late voice.

As former editor of the Oxford Companion English Literature, author of an influential study on Wordsworth and writer of eighteen acclaimed novels, Margaret Drabble brings both critical and creative literary expertise. She will guide an intimate class through Wordsworth’s canon, context and life to revive his ideals of poetry as both accessible and powerful for contemporary readers. 

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From the how to website: Participants are asked to prepare for the seminar by reading the following:

Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads;  Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality