It’s time to celebrate the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth, born 250 years ago in a picturesque market town in northern England. One way to size up his achievement is to venture backward, beginning in the present day and drifting past the postmodernists, the modernists, the Edwardians, the Victorians, until we finally reach Wordsworth, who for all his distance seems a kindred soul. We “get” him. Ours is an age rich in self-reflection and memoir writing, hospitable to a poet who chose himself as his primary subject. Wordsworth’s masterpiece, “The Prelude,” an endlessly revised unrhymed poem of 13 books that was...

Source: Wall Street Journal July 17, 2020 14:48 UTC