‘What distinguished Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world’ Seamus HeaneyJohn Clare (1793-1864) was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Wordsworth or Shelley – and a life to match. The ‘poet’s poet’, he has a place in the national pantheon and, more tangibly, a plaque in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, unveiled in 1989.Here at last is Clare’s full story, from his ...

A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020‘Radical Wordsworth deserves to take its place as the finest modern introduction to his work, life and impact’ Financial Times‘Richly repays reading … It is hard to think of another poet who has changed our world so much’ Sunday TimesA dazzling new biography of Wordsworth’s radical life as a thinker and poetical innovator, published to mark the 250th anniversary of h...

‘Enlightening, moving’ SIR IAN MCKELLENFrom the acclaimed and bestselling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives.‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.’How does one survive the death of a loved one, the mess of war, the experience of being schooled, of falling in love, of growing old, of losing ...

The most important critical work for decades' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday TimesIn the brilliantly engaging style that characterised The Genius of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate has written a series of compelling pieces on the link between literature and the environment and why poetry matters in the new millennium. In fascinating detail, Bate explains how words like 'culture' and 'environment' have evolved since the writing of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and the Romantics to...

The long-awaited literary biography of the supreme "poets' poet"John Clare (1793-1864) is the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self, but until now he has never been the subject of a comprehensive literary biography.Here at last is his full story told by the light of his voluminous work: his birth in poverty, his work as an ag...

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZEA magisterial life of Ted Hughes – identified recently as the only English poet since the First World War with a claim to true greatness and one of Britain’s most important writers – to be published on National Poetry Day by prize-winning biographer Jonathan Bate.Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain’s most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk ...

From one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged Shakespeare’s imaginationBen Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having “small Latin and less Greek.” But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature, history, and rhetoric, he moved to London, a city that modeled itself on ancient Rome. He worked in a theatr...

A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald.‘Highly engaging … Go now, read this book’ THE TIMES‘For awhile after you quit Keats,’ Fitzgerald once wrote, ‘All other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.’John Keats died two hundred years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began one hundred years ago, the Jazz Age.In this biography, prizewinning author ...

Sweeping across two millennia and every literary genre, acclaimed scholar and biographer Jonathan Bate provides a dazzling introduction to English Literature. The focus is wide, shifting from the birth of the novel and the brilliance of English comedy to the deep Englishness of landscape poetry and the ethnic diversity of Britain's Nobel literature laureates. It goes on to provide a more in-depth analysis, with close readings from an extraordinary scene in King Lear to a war poem by Carol ...

With an introduction by Simon CallowJudgements about the quality of works of art begin in opinion. But for the last two hundred years only the wilfully perverse (and Tolstoy) have denied the validity of the opinion that Shakespeare was a genius.Who was Shakespeare? Why has his writing endured? And what makes it so endlessly adaptable to different times and cultures? Exploring Shakespeare's life, including questions of authorship and autobiography, ...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE‘Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long time to come’ Sunday Times‘Seldom has the life of a writer rattled along with such furious activity … A moving, fascinating biography’ The TimesTed Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain’s most important poets, a p...