Review

"[This] excellent study admirably substantiates the exact nature of their political involvement."--Studies in English Literature

"An important attempt to return Romanticism to its proper place as a literary and social movement, as well as a literary and psychological one....Roe's book is detailed and scrupulously researched and documented, but it is also an exciting narrative of two of the most interesting careers in English literary history."--Virginia Quarterly Review

"By his persuasive, cumulative delineation of cultural crisis, mapped on a scale both national, even international, and particular to the work of the two writers and the subculture of Camridge radicals in which they traveled, Roe reveals the rich soil from which the extraordinarily fertile interaction between Coleridge and Wordsworth stemmed when they met at last in the autumn of 1795."--Review

"Here is that genuine rarity, a study that adds enormously to an often treated subject....The rich manuscript sources consulted by Nicholas Roe, in both England and France, have yielded so much new information that all previous treatments are at once superseded....Students of English history and politics, as well as English majors, will here find the best account available of what the turbulent political-intellectual-religious atmosphere of London was like in the decade following the French Revolution....Gifted undergraduates as well as graduate faculty will profit from this outstanding volume."--Choice

Product Description

This study is a much-needed reappraisal of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's radical careers before their emergence as major poets. Dr Roe presents a detailed examination of both writers' debts to radical dissent in the years before 1789.

Wordsworth's first-hand experience of Revolution in France is treated in depth, and both Wordsworth's and Coleridge's relations with William Godwin and John Thelwall are clarified. In each case the poets are shown to have been vividly alive to radical issues in Britain and France, and much more closely involved with the popular reform movement represented by the London Corresponding Society than has hitherto been suspected.

The author argues against any generalized pattern of withdrawal from politics into retirement after 1795. He offers instead a reading of Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude, and The Recluse that emphasizes the integration of imaginative life and radical experience. For Coleridge the loss of revolutionary idealism prefigured the collapse of his creative and personal life after 1798. For Wordsworth, on the other hand, revolutionary failure was the key to his emergence as poet of Tintern Abbey and The Prelude.