“... and its lessons were … what the French Revolution and the doctrines that accompanied it were to Wordsworth, or Godwinism to Shelley.’ The boldness of his claim becomes clear when we set it beside the almost simultaneous announcement by the influential critic John Palmer that Shakespeare was ‘forced’, by the public demand for plays about political ...”

“... seems to have generated its own spiritual antidote. One of his teachers, trying to explain what Wordsworth meant when he spoke of ‘trances’, is said to have referred him to Ramakrishna, a yogi at a nearby temple. In fact, curiosity about Ramakrishna was already widespread by the time of their first encounter in 1881. Even if the story is untrue, it ...”

“... commandments in Don Juan: ‘Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dryden, Pope;/Thou shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey.’ And in the 20th century, especially since the Second World War, a number of distinguished literary scholars have devoted years to studying and generally celebrating Pope. With the publication of a collection of essays on Pope ...”

“... to a fire at sea on the voyage home. More realisable and still more wildly adventurous was William Moorcroft, who trained as a doctor and became a pioneer veterinary surgeon in London, until he gambled away his capital at the races. Appointed to supervise and improve the stock of horses in British India, Moorcroft in 1810-11 and 1819-25 made two ...”

“... moral philosophers based their arguments on self-evident truths. (An unclerical example is Sir William Temple, in his essay on Epicurus.) It was also commonly agreed that few men bowed voluntarily to the constraints of morality; nearly all had to be driven into it by supernatural warnings. Objectors, like Shaftesbury and his followers, were audible but ...”

“... Robin has fallen downstairs’; and there’s an episode in one of Richmal Crompton’s William books in which a world-famous infant, of obnoxious smugness and the subject of best-selling works by his mother, informs the unimpressed Outlaws: ‘They’re literary stories and poems, you know. Really cultured people buy them for their children.’) In ...”

“... background wasn’t as proletarian as Shaw implies. When his father died and his mother remarried, William, his sister and his ‘imbecile brother’ were adopted by their grandparents, an elderly but far from impoverished couple: before retiring and running a pub in Newport, his grandfather had been a sea captain and, as he never tired of telling ...”

“... a very curious hypothesis. Supposing ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ had been produced, not by Wordsworth, but by water erosion. Should we then be able to refer, in discussing the poem, to its ‘speaker’? Juhl makes this a rhetorical question – no answer necessary but if one must be given it will be ‘no’. But surely the answer is ‘yes’. We ...”

“... of another, Southey was the contemporary poet most sympathetic to Scott. But he agreed with Wordsworth and Coleridge that Scott had gone too far down-market, even if Marmion’s academic freight must have been some reassurance – three thousand cross-references in its text, glossary and footnotes to authorities, sources and parallels. Scott was well on ...”

“... Nonsence), and dramatic burlesque is close to the heart of much of his best nonsense verse. What Wordsworth and all those inanely pious Victorian schoolroom poems were for Carroll in the 1860s – the foundation for parodies which steal their forms and twist their affects by robbing them of their logical referents – Marlowe and Kyd prove to have been for ...”

“... with faith: a loving dog might exemplify a loving God whose ‘strength of feeling’, as Wordsworth wrote in ‘Fidelity’ of 1805, was equally beyond human estimate. Dogs were a tie. That was their point. They encouraged and anchored the affections; they set a limit to self-centredness, prompting reflection on the need, in an increasingly ...”

“... Phillips’s history of postwar black England. Early arrivals who had been weaned on Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dickens imagined the metropolis as ancient and archival. They had peered at celluloid images of its citadels and monuments on the Movietone newsreels screened before the main features at their local Empire Theatre fleapit. They had listened to the ...”

“... population, and in which death would be, if not eliminated, at least indefinitely postponed. William Godwin pointed to the enormous agricultural capacity of the world’s yet unexploited land: mind would triumph over matter, and ‘there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment.’ It was better that there should be more people rather ...”

“... autobiographical material with the foreshortening and ambiguity of an imaginative work – what Wordsworth meant by ‘to throw over incidents and situations from common life a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect’. The unusual aspect of Peterley Harvest gave its first reviewers an ...”

“... Hellas, and remains, even through a sequence of undistinguished poems on George Eliot and Dorothy Wordsworth, haunted by the genius loci. There are poems about Venice and London. New Providence claims attention. But Greece exerts the strongest pull, a centripetal appeal. Olympia, Thermopylae, Dodona, Hippocrene: there’s a roll and thunder of big ...”