Two hundred and fifty years ago, on April 7, 1770, the English poet William Wordsworth was born. We are also close to the anniversary of his death, which occurred 80 years later on April 23, 1850.

Mondrian: His Life, His Art, and the Quest for the Absolute Moss (The Fell) masterfully evokes the insidiousness of self-doubt in this poetic account of growing up with an eating disorder in 1980s ...

William Wordsworth, whose 250th birthday we celebrate this year, revolutionized our conception of poetry when he began to write using the language of ordinary men and women. For instance, in his “Ode: ...

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was a democrat in his youth, along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, his contemporaries in England’s first Romantic generation. Unlike them he was a democrat still ...

We have absorbed so much of the romantic vision — the sublimity of mountains, the mesmerizing moments alone in nature, the belief in childhood innocence, the faith (however tarnished these days) in ...

Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vol., ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), vol. 13, “Totem ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...

“Wordsworth: A Life” (Ecco, 576 pages, $29.95) descends on these shores trailing clouds of glory. Winner of the Rose Crawshay Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize, and ...