No one has described better the strange and obsessive nature of biographical pursuit, and the business of “footstepping” has since become associated with the Holmesian style of method-biography, in which the biographical subject returns from the dead with a palpable physical presence.Īdam Nicolson makes plain his debt to Richard Holmes: “I think of this book as a tributary to the great Holmesian stream,” he says in the introductory chapter to The Making of Poetry. Sleeping, as Stevenson did, beneath the stars, bathing in rivers, and feeling half mad on the excess of liberty, Holmes learned that his vocation was to live like a ghost crab in another man’s shell. Later, Coleridge would write that he “was repelled by the infinite number of dissonances which way of thinking, feeling and arguing created with my own.” And that’s not all he had to say about Wordsworth: “Recently all the shortcomings, each marked him in his early manic manly years, have increased considerably the grand flourishings of his philosophic and poetic genius, have withered and dried.” Yikes.In Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Richard Holmes described how, aged 18, he followed the route taken by Robert Louis Stevenson and his donkey almost 100 years earlier as they walked through the Massif Central in France. Coleridge agreed to this, but was understandably hurt-wouldn’t you be too if your best friend tried to snipe your publication credit? So, as the New York Times points out, when Coleridge and Wordsworth collaborated on the collection Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth rudely insisted on his name being the only name on the title page and retained sole copyright. How the tables turned from joyfully shaming Hazlitt! As sometimes happens with BFFs, Coleridge and Wordsworth gradually tired of each other: Coleridge got annoyed by Wordsworth’s conservatism, and Wordsworth took issue with Coleridge’s instability and opium addiction. Samuel Coleridge was Wordsworth’s frenemy for years. ![]() Wordsworth’s Hazlitt slander may have been spurred by the fact that in 1814, Hazlitt dissed Wordsworth’s The Excursion in print, saying though it was beautiful, Wordsworth was one of the “greatest egotists that we know of.” No wonder no one wants to write negative reviews! (To be fair, Hazlitt should not have spanked that woman.) Benjamin Haydon, friend of Hazlitt’s, says that by 1817 Wordsworth spoke “with great horror Hazlitt’s licentious conduct to the girls of the Lake & that no woman could walk after dark for ‘his Satyr and beastly appetites.’” This seriously discredited Hazlitt in literary circles. ![]() Over the years as their political sensibilities diverged from Hazlitt’s, Coleridge and Wordsworth embellished this story, which they told often. The woman’s friends showed up to enact payback on Hazlitt, so Coleridge sent Hazlitt to take shelter in the house of Coleridge’s best friend at the time, William Wordsworth. It’s said that while visiting his friend, the poet Samuel Coleridge, Hazlitt made a pass at a woman in a tavern in the Lake District, and when she rejected him, he lifted her skirts and spanked her (no, Hazlitt!). Samuel Hazlitt resented Wordsworth for spreading rumors about his “beastly appetites.” Here are a few notable contemporaries whom Wordsworth once alienated: (Why not?) For someone who had such wonder and amazement in his heart for, say, a mountain, Wordsworth was not a warm guy he said of himself that as a child he had a “stiff, moody, and violent temper,” and judging by his interactions with his peers, that temper may not have totally dissipated. ![]() It’s William Wordsworth’s 251st birthday today, and we’re celebrating by taking a look at people who didn’t like him.
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