Poetry in

James Fenton wonders if this revised book on the life of Wordsworth contains too many of the biographer's opinions

The ideal, for literary biography, is that the author should be able to address two audiences at once: the academic and the nonspecialist. Wordsworth is a figure of supreme interest to both groups: a great poet, a friend of the great, a man at the centre of complex emotional entanglements, a lover of nature. He is associated above all with the Lake District, which became in his day, and remains, a favorite part of England for walkers, climbers and other holidaymakers. No other English poet is so profoundly associated with the landscape he knew.

When Juliet Barker's Wordsworth: A Life first appeared in Britain in 2000 it won four awards and was appreciatively reviewed, with some qualifications: it was thought sensible but perhaps overlong and written in a sometimes irritating style, and with an unhelpful index. The version now published by Ecco differs greatly from the original, having been reduced from 971 to 548 pages. Some tiresome touches have disappeared, and the index has been improved, but the notes and bibliography (which were substantial, amounting to some 134 pages) have gone, and with them most of the book's scholarly usefulness.

For so thorough a researcher, Barker has an uncertain instinct when it comes to important if peripheral matters like the reading habits of the day. In 1791, a week before sitting his Cambridge examinations, Wordsworth spends his time reading Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa Harlowe, which Barker calls "an overpoweringly dull exposition of 'the Distresses that may attend Misconduct both of Parents and Children in relation to Marriage,' in seven ponderous volumes." If you don't know that Clarissa was a great 18th-century bestseller, this intrusion of the biographer's personal taste is highly misleading. Wordsworth was no doubt gripped enough to take his mind off his exams.

When Wordsworth rents a house in Dorset in 1795, he finds among other luxuries a library of 470 books, mostly legal and classical texts but also some that are, as Barker puts it, "oddly out of place in an otherwise heavyweight collection, Henry Fielding's novel Joseph Andrews and Jonathan Swift's satire A Tale of a Tub." But how else, in the 18th century, was one supposed to get through the long winter nights in Dorset? And where else in such a house would you expect to find such books?

When Wordsworth and his future wife, Mary Hutchinson, were children, they attended the Dame School at Penrith, where they were taught by an elderly lady called Ann Birkhead. "One of her most eccentric 'methods,' " Barker writes, "was to allow her young pupils, the oldest of whom were only eight years old, to use Joseph Addison's periodical, The Spectator, as a reading book."

This detail is something Mary Wordsworth remembered with amusement in old age (her aunt had given her the book). But The Spectator essays were highly popular literature, and must have given the provincial reader a thrilling glimpse of London life. Many of the books that children read in those days, before children's literature developed as a specialized form, strike the modern reader as odd, but it might have been worth noting that if the child Wordsworth was reading The Spectator he would have found there one of the first appreciations of the English ballads that became so important to his own poetry and that of his contemporaries.

Barker is a partial biographer, in the sense that she sides with her subject against characters who cross his path. Annette Vallon, with whom the young Wordsworth had an affair in France and who bore his daughter, is blatantly undermined. We are told that Robert Southey found French women sensual and irresistible, and wrote that they had "something of Aspasia" – a famous Greek courtesan – "about them."

Then: "Certainly, if William was as naïve sexually as he was politically, he would not have been difficult to seduce. Annette was a very determined young woman; at 25, she was also four years older than her lover.... Nor can one ignore the fact that Annette's older unmarried sister, Françoise, also gave birth to an illegitimate child, a son, whom she did not acknowledge as hers for 20 years. If nothing else, this suggests that the Vallons had a much more relaxed view of female morality than was customary in a comparable English family at the time."

The denigration used here (Southey found French women to have something of the prostitute about them, ergo Annette was a schemer, and from an immoral family to boot) ignores the evidence from Annette's own pen, that she passionately wanted to restore her respectability, and that of her child and her family, by marriage. Nor was the royalist, Catholic Françoise relaxed about having had a baby. After all, she gave it away for adoption. The appeal made by Annette in the letters to Wordsworth – they survived by chance in a French archive – is labeled "an eloquent form of emotional blackmail."

Since Barker uses the phrase twice, quite emphatically, one feels moved to remind her that blackmail is a crime. Begging your lover to return and marry you and be a father to his child is in no sense blackmail. "Never once," Barker writes, "does Annette mention William's poetry in her letters." But only three of her letters have survived out of an extensive correspondence between Annette and William and Dorothy (Wordsworth's sister). This kind of partisanship is exasperating, and it poisons Barker's account of William's relationship with Coleridge, so that throughout the book one has difficulty understanding what Wordsworth saw in his friend, and why he felt in such need of his company.

What about Wordsworth's poetry? Barker is an unreliable judge. She is enthusiastic about his blank verse tragedy, The Borderers, calling it "always powerful, alternately shocking and moving." And she agrees with its author in attributing its rejection to "the deprav'd State of the Stage at present". But the fact is that none of the English Romantic poets succeeded in writing for the stage, although most of them tried. Not one of their works has since entered the repertory. A modern London audience that is happy to go to see Schiller should have nothing against The Borderers in principle.

About the longish poem 'Peter Bell', Barker writes that "though the poem has its admirers, for most readers it is an experiment too far. It teeters uneasily on the brink of doggerel, and occasionally slips over." But 'Peter Bell' is a wonderful piece of versification and its first section is particularly sprightly. Barker finds the famous preface to the Lyrical Ballads to be "extraordinarily dense and obscure in its language and argument." "Time and again," she continues, "struggling to understand some complex and grandiloquently expressed statement, one comes to the uncomfortable conclusion that it is either meaningless or blindingly obvious." This is quite unexpected, after such relentless advocacy.

And then, with engaging frankness, Barker adds: "The equally unpleasant alternative is that one is the only person in the world too stupid to understand its true meaning." One turns, as with 'Peter Bell' and The Borderers, to reread Wordsworth's text and see if one's memory is at fault. But Wordsworth, who was after all defending the use of everyday language instead of poetic diction, seems pretty clear. So a certain bafflement sets in. Barker is a knowledgeable guide to what happened, but an uncertain interpreter of what it all meant.

James Fenton was professor of poetry at Oxford. His selected poems will be published later this year.

© 2006 The New York Times

Painting opposite left: 'Wordsworth on Helvellyn', 1842 by Benjamin Robert Haydon.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Opposite: Wordsworth's home, Dove Cottage in Grasmere, England