Rhyme and reason

Wordsworth: A Life
By Juliet Barker
Ecco, 548 pp., illustrated, $29.95

In her masterful new biography, ''Wordsworth: A Life," Juliet Barker describes a January evening in 1818 when John Keats dined for the first time with William Wordsworth; his wife, Mary; and sister-in-law, Sara. Keats idolized Wordsworth, but at one point attempted to interrupt him. ''When he tried to intervene in one of William's lengthy disquisitions on poetry," Barker writes, ''Mary laid a restraining hand on his arm and murmured, 'Mr Wordsworth is never interrupted.' "

In the preceding year, Wordsworth had earned a paltry 17 pounds from his published verses and had earlier accepted a government position akin to tax collector for financial security. As a literary figure, however, he had attained monumental stature; particularly, his critics sniped, in his own eyes. ''I am sorry that Wordsworth has left a bad impression wherever he visited in Town -- by his egotism, Vanity and bigotry," Keats later remarked, ''yet he is a great Poet if not a Philosopher."

Barker writes sympathetically yet dispassionately about the man, the poet, and the philosopher, describing the often contradictory aspects of Wordsworth's behavior and thought as they mutated over almost eight decades. The result is not a work of literary criticism, although Barker is an astute critic, but a meticulously researched account of a long, dignified, and intermittently tragic life. Drawing on previously unpublished sources, Barker provides details of housekeeping, friendships, love affairs, travels, illnesses, deaths, and, of course, money (chiefly lack of) that lend her elegant narrative the density and intimacy of a 19th-century novel. (We learn, for example, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, while visiting the Wordsworths, developed a swollen testicle that ''responded to the application of three leeches and a home-made poultice.")

In ''Wordsworth: A Life," contradictions -- even ironies -- abound. When he died, in 1850, at the age of 79, the poet laureate to Queen Victoria was a revered master who had failed to complete his most ambitious work, ''The Recluse." He had lived through -- and, in some cases, witnessed -- the greatest upheavals of his age, including the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Irish famine, and the triumph of the Industrial Revolution, but he deliberately inhabited a world that was resistant to change. A political radical who despised monarchy and peerage, Wordsworth became a middle-aged Tory who campaigned for the election of his local lord, reviled ''unbridled democracy," and lobbied against the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act and the 1830 Reform Bill, among other progressive measures. A loving husband and father, he maintained a lengthy correspondence with the French mistress of his youth, the mother of his eldest daughter.

Barker quotes from letters, private journals, and contemporary reviews, and from Wordsworth's published and unpublished works. ''These people in the senseless hurry of their idle lives do not read books," Wordsworth sniffed in 1807, following the publication of ''Poems, in Two Volumes" to a poor reception, ''they merely snatch a glance at them that they may talk about them. . . . Every great and original writer . . . must teach the art by which he is to be seen."

Many critics demurred. Reviewing Wordsworth's ''The Excursion" in 1814 , William Hazlitt complained that ''it is not so much a description of natural objects as of the feelings associated with them. . . . His thoughts are his real subjects," an observation that unintentionally identified one of the poet's greatest attributes but one that Hazlitt, like many others, apprehended as egotism.

As early as 1796, Wordsworth had, in Barker's words, reverted ''to Shakespeare as a model . . . thrown off the shackles of the Spenserian stanza and the eighteenth-century affectation of melancholy [and] discovered the power of blank verse." Both his heart and style were also profoundly altered by grief, first at his elder brother's death by drowning in 1805 and later at the deaths, within a six-month span, of his 3-year-old daughter and his 6-year-old son. Several months after the first loss, he wrote in ''Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle": ''A power is gone, which nothing can restore; / A deep distress hath humanized my Soul. / Not for a moment could I now behold / A smiling sea, and be what I have been."

Toward the end of his life Wordsworth also watched his devoted sister, Dorothy, losing her mind and his daughter, Dora, dying from tuberculosis at the age of 43. If his letters and verses from that time contradict the impression of a cold, self-involved artist, Wordsworth's public pronouncements seem to validate repeated charges of political naivete at best and opportunism at worst. When Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the poet at his home in the Lake District in 1833, he was ''surprised by the hard limits of his thought. To judge from a single conversation, he made the impression of a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity. Off his own beat, his opinions were of no value."

Barker admonishes Emerson for being dismissive, but wryly concedes that Wordsworth ''felt that the golden age had ended with his own birth in 1770," a conjunction she judges to be ''poignant symbolism rather than historical fact." It is a testimony not only to her scholarship but also to her literary skill that the poet and the man appear as fully formed here as did the Brontës in Barker's remarkable 1994 study of that family. We see him at a small Christmas party in 1817, being teased by the delightfully inebriated Charles Lamb. '' 'Now, you old lake poet, you rascally poet, why do you call Voltaire dull?' he demanded of William. . . . Lamb was irresistible and William laughed as heartily as the rest."

Anna Mundow is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.