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Although we know him as one of the greatest English poets, Wordsworth might not have become a poet at all without the experience of personal and historical catastrophe in his youth. In Disowned by Memory, David Bromwich connects the accidents of Wordsworth's life with the originality of his works, tracking the impulses that turned him to poetry after the death of his parents and during his years as an enthusiastic disciple of the French Revolution. From these events Wordsworth developed a strong sympathy with political idealism and with the outcast and the dispossessed. This sympathy, Bromwich compellingly argues, formed the deepest motive of Wordsworth's writings of the 1790s. For example, Bromwich sees "The Old Cumberland Beggar" as "a radical act of human solidarity" that was key to Wordsworth's development as a poet. Wordsworth's ethical act of attention to the old beggar and others not only crystallized his faith in the power of the imagination to preserve human nature, but also originated the idea of personal consciousness so crucial to modern poetry

"The Wordsworth in DISOWNED BY MEMORY is a complicated and sharp-edged individual....[A] benefit of this book is that it restores our faith that criticism can actually speak to our needs. Bromwich is a rigorous critic, but he is a general one whose insights are broadly applicable. It's an intellectual pleasure to rise to his complexities."

Vijay Seshadri, New York Times Book Review, 08/15/1999

Disowned by Memory: Wordsworth's Poetry of the 1790s: Search Results