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Radical Wordsworth
- The Poet Who Changed the World
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 14 hrs and 5 mins
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Publisher's summary
On the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth's birth comes a highly imaginative and vivid portrait of a revolutionary poet who embodied the spirit of his age.
Published in time for the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth's birth, this is the biography of a great poetic genius, a revolutionary who changed the world. Wordsworth rejoiced in the French Revolution and played a central role in the cultural upheaval that we call the Romantic Revolution.
He and his fellow Romantics changed forever the way we think about childhood, the sense of the self, our connection to the natural environment, and the purpose of poetry. But his was also a revolutionary life in the old sense of the word, insofar as his art was of memory, the return of the past, the circling back to childhood and youth.
This beautifully written biography is purposefully fragmentary, momentary, and selective, opening up what Wordsworth called "the hiding-places of my power."
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Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence - how to be a human being in the world? - while exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him.
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Fatally flawed
- By Citizen M on 02-26-23
By: Clare Carlisle
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The Reason for the Darkness of the Night
- Edgar Allan Poe and the Forging of American Science
- By: John Tresch
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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John Tresch offers a bold new biography of a writer whose short, tortured life continues to fascinate. Shining a spotlight on an era when the lines separating entertainment, speculation, and scientific inquiry were blurred, Tresch reveals Poe's obsession with science and lifelong ambition to advance and question human knowledge. He remained an avid and often combative commentator on new discoveries, publishing and hustling in literary scenes that also hosted the era's most prominent scientists, semi-scientists, and pseudo-intellectual rogues.
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Know the Real Poe
- By Elliott Wolfe, M.D. on 06-28-21
By: John Tresch
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Wagnerism
- Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music
- By: Alex Ross
- Narrated by: Alex Ross
- Length: 28 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Alex Ross, renowned New Yorker music critic and author of the international best seller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Rest Is Noise, reveals how Richard Wagner became the proving ground for modern art and politics - an aesthetic war zone where the Western world wrestled with its capacity for beauty and violence.
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Not Just for Wagner Experts!
- By Rupert Pupkin on 09-26-20
By: Alex Ross
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Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
- By: Andrew S. Curran
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.
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lifelong coverage of his life.
- By Michael Daly on 03-22-21
By: Andrew S. Curran
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The Renaissance
- Studies in Art and Poetry
- By: Walter Pater
- Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Published to great acclaim in 1873, Walter Pater’s compendium of idiosyncratic, impressionistic essays on the Renaissance gained him a reputation as a daring modern philosopher. Oscar Wilde called it the “holy writ of beauty.” It was Pater’s cry of “art for art’s sake” that became the manifesto for the aesthetic movement. He believed that art should be sensual and that beauty should rank as the highest ideal. Marked by elegant fluency, Pater’s essays discuss Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and other artists who, for him, embodied the spirit of the Renaissance.
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Wanda McCaddon and Pater = 😍
- By Tyler on 02-01-21
By: Walter Pater
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Ted Hughes
- The Unauthorized Life
- By: Jonathan Bate
- Narrated by: Mike Grady
- Length: 25 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Ted Hughes, poet laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron.
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Phenomenal thanks to narrator!
- By equinox14 on 06-26-16
By: Jonathan Bate
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Square Haunting
- Five Writers in London Between the Wars
- By: Francesca Wade
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures - many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living - and, therefore, of being - these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence.
By: Francesca Wade
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Letters to a Young Poet
- By: Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen Mitchell - translator
- Narrated by: Stephen Mitchell
- Length: 1 hr and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Ranier Maria Rilke challenges you, "...to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers." Rilke's ability to combine the sensual and the spiritual into an inspired vision of the art of living is brought to vivid life in his letters. Through his eyes, the everyday difficulties of love, sex, solitude, sadness, and doubt are seen as the archetypal elements of the drama called life.
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Priceless Recordings of Intense Feeling
- By David on 10-08-04
By: Rainer Maria Rilke, and others
What listeners say about Radical Wordsworth
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JCW
- 08-23-22
A words worth to listen
This great audiobook by Jonathan Bate is filled with insight into our Beloved Poet, William Wordsworth. The words and the narration are wonderfully done. Although, I couldn’t disagree more with Professor Bate about who was the real man behind the writings of Shakespeare (it is being conclusively proven beyond a shadow of a doubt yearly that he was the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere), this amazing book is culminated in its final chapter On the Love of Nature Leading to the Love of Mankind. I cannot agree more with his depth of analysis. Nevertheless, mankind is not so very kind these days, but we find that individual men and women of genius have benefited all of us immensely. This chapter must be listened to and more than just heard repeatedly. It’s a masterpiece of writing. I most highly recommend this audiobook. I hope you will enjoy as much as I have in its appreciation of one of our greatest poets, Willian Wordsworth. Happy listening!
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- MCD
- 05-19-21
brings it all together on wordsworth's life
learned so much about a poet I was introduced to sixth grade in Jacksonville Florida
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- Laurence R. Baker
- 09-21-23
Enlightening and well narrated
Jonathan Bates is an exceptionally skilled writer. HIs scholarship is impeccable and his breadth of knowledge impressive. Full disclosure - I am an English teacher and taught a tenth grade course in British Lit for many years (I imagine such a class is long gone). I dutifully addressed the “Romantic Poets” but always felt that I did not have a full grasp of what the “Romantic Movement” actually was. I still don’t as Bates has convinced me of its elasticity as it applies to literature immediately before, during and immediately after Wordsworth’s life. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal about how Wordsworth’s life experiences helped to produce his profoundly rich decade of inspired poems. I also appreciated the digressions Bates selectively made with persons and historical events that influenced Wordsworth. Focusing on this period and the “radical Wordsworth” was a wise choice as the latter half or more of his life seems quite unremarkable. I have now listened to two of Bates works and look forward to a third which is also free with a subscription.
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- John L. Heineman
- 08-17-20
Radical Wordswoth makes its case
The book gathers momentum as it goes along, reaching its highest moments in its late chapters arguing that Wordsworth is indeed our contemporary in his attempt via poetry to teach us to love the earth, our only dwelling. The author makes a powerful case for Wordsworth’s contemporary importance through his influence on Ruskin, Arnold, and Americans like Emerson and, most unexpectedly, John Muir. Also a powerful case for the enduring power of poetry, which does, in fact, make things happen. The reader is mostly good, his British accent appropriate to the subject, though he unfortunately mispronounces the names of Southey and Yeats, the former frequently throughout.
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5 people found this helpful