Word: wordsworths
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...produced. His English friend Samuel Coleridge wrote: "To you alone of all contemporary Artists does it seem to have been given, to know what Nature is-not the dead shapes, the outward Letter-but the Life of Nature itself." His friends and admirers were transatlantic giants of the day: Wordsworth, Southey, Bryant, Longfellow, Washington Irving, Oliver Wendell Holmes...
...aloud, he would sometimes come upon a passage so affecting that he could not read it. He would thrash his legs indignantly, glare at his students, loudly clear his throat, and then try the passage again. Some of his students would swear that he never got half way through Wordsworth's Michael without having to stop...
Though few of his fellow townsmen in Princeton knew or cared, he was generally acknowledged to be the world's authority on Wordsworth. When, in the course of his researches into Wordsworth's life, he discovered that the poet had fathered an illegitimate child, he was as distressed as if the scandal had happened in his own family. It was a long time before he could bring himself to publish what he had found...
...years, Herbert Read has written 20-odd books of poetry, criticism and biography (Wordsworth; In Defense of Shelley) and become Britain's top authority on modern art. He is a not uncommon type of his generation-an intellectual who was born early enough to enjoy the traditional tranquillity of Victorian rural England, but who reached an individualistic maturity during the disordered years between two wars. It is in this respect that his autobiography makes good reading-for Read shuns sensational confessions and concentrates on the varying influences that left their marks on his mind...
Samuel Marshak's Twelve Months is the only surprise package in the book-and the best. Author Marshak is a translator of Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Shakespeare, Burns, and his new play is a lyrical fantasy on the old Christmas pantomime model, complete with the wicked old woman, Cinderella-girl, a young queen, talking animals and magic wands. Twelve Months does nothing to establish a new tradition, but it does add charm and poetry to a very...