Word: wordsworth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...English letters or natural science while rusticating or ruminating at either place, for he would not have said that Oxford has the edge in poetry, nor would he have failed to recognize the distinction of Cambridge in the field of science. Can Oxford possibly match Spenser, Marlowe, Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge . . . or Bacon, Harvey, Darwin...
...such reasoning, supplemented by a good deal of digging through library stacks and tracking down the descendants of famous men, scholars have turned up some lively bits of unexpected history. They have exposed a host of literary forgeries, revealed that Poet William Wordsworth fathered an illegitimate daughter during a stay in France in 1792,* established that Poet Christopher Marlowe was not killed in a row over a bawd (as Puritans told the story), but over who should pay a tavern check†. One of the most impressively persistent investigations of all was the case of old Sir Thomas Malory...
Like so many monks, the boys of Eton and Harrow had practiced for weeks, preparing fair copies of Wordsworth's sonnet, Upon Westminster Bridge. The Etonians leaned heavily to 16th Century chancery-a tight, slanting, angular style brought by Vatican scribes to Elizabethan England, which avoids loops, keeps "t's" and "p's" short, uses a broad pen for contrasting thick and thin strokes...
...Wordsworth contended that nobody should pry into the private lives of authors. "Our business," said he, "is with their books-to understand them." But topflight London Neurologist Walter Russell Brain is curious about the writers themselves. In the current Journal of the British Medical Association, Dr. Brain reports on some medico-literary autopsies which expose the mental instability of many a genius...