“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 the Lakeland Book of the Year award, Juliet Barker’s book has already been anointed the standard biography.

But to anyone devoted to Wordsworth, let alone to biography as a genre, Ms. Barker’s astonishing avoidance of her predecessors is troubling. Her book is devoid of notes and bibliography, and it includes only the briefest of acknowledgments. She makes vague references to other biographers when she wants to correct the record, but without some kind of documentation,it will be difficult for the scholar to assess her accomplishment, and impossible for the general reader.

Ms. Barker directly cites only one other biography, Stephen Gill’s “Wordsworth: A Life” (1989), which she calls “a model of its kind.” What kind might that be? Well, Mr. Gill has devoted a lifetime of scholarship to Wordworth, and by many accounts produced the standard biography – although Mary Moorman’s two-volume “William Wordsworth: A Biography” (1957, 1965) remains a classic that no reader of Wordsworth or of biography ought to ignore.

Ms. Barker, like Mr. Gill, had access to new material, in her case from French archives. This in itself does not make earlier biographies redundant but does enlarge,of course,the range of evidence subsequent biographers and readers are required to consult. Biography, in other words, has an incremental progression that books like Ms. Barker’s obscure.

This is all very odd. Ms. Barker had more than 100 pages of double-column notes for her much-heralded “The Brontes.” For “Wordsworth,” she might at least have produced an incisive bibliographical essay. This blinkered biography is even more perplexing in that Ms. Barker has a competitor: Kenneth Johnston’s “The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy” (1998), which also turned up new archival material.

I presume Ms. Barker’s silence on the subject of Wordsworth as spy means she does not think much of Mr. Johnston’s contention that the impecunious poet became a British government informant while making forays into France during the Revolution. Mr. Johnston does not prove his case, but his speculations do demonstrate just how deeply Wordsworth became involved in radical politics – a point Ms. Barker does not deny but rather soft-pedals.

In part, I think, she wants to minimize the contrast with the later Victorian Wordsworth, the poet laureate. Ms. Barker writes a form of what might be called British Empiricist Biography. On the unusually close relationship between William and Dorothy, she writes that such brother-sister unions were not uncommon in that epoch and that suspicions of incest are largely the work of that crazed opium addict, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In other words, if there is no material evidence, it didn’t happen.

Here I have to declare an interest.As a student of that great Coleridgean, Kathleen Coburn, I have always found Wordsworth the man (not the poet) a bit of a stick, one who went into decline as a writer after he and STC broke off their intimate collaboration. Ms. Barker acknowledges that when it comes to WW and STC, opinion divides sharply. I salute her, though, in showing that Wordsworth was a much more social and engaging fellow than is commonly appreciated. He may have written about the virtues of solitude, but he liked a good party.

Ms. Barker quotes copiously from Wordsworth’s poetry without analyzing it very much. Instead, she deftly provides the context for understanding how the lines came to be written. The result is almost an anthology of the poet’s verse, which works surprisingly well and is a sort of throwback to 19thcentury biographies like Elizabeth Gaskell’s account of Charlotte Bronte. Indeed, Ms. Barker sounds a Victorian note when she deplores the behavior of that callow young man, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who visited WW in 1833 and was alternately amused and impressed:

This reciting [of his poetry] was so unexpected & extraordinary,-he, the old Wordsworth, standing forth & reciting to me in a garden walk, like a schoolboy “speaking his piece,”-that I at first had nearly laughed; but recollecting myself, that I had come thus far to see a poet, & he was chaunting poems to me, I saw, that he was right, & I was wrong & gladly gave myself up to hear.

Outraged that her subject’s home has been invaded by such a churl, Ms. Barker sniffs: “it was neither the first nor the last time that the privilege of meeting with, and talking to, the poet in the privacy of his own home would be abused.”

Ms. Barker does not seem to twig that biography itself is an abuse of hospitality. She has more in common with Emerson the egregious than is dreamed of in her philosophy. Where would she be if Emerson had eschewed his Boswellian turn and not recorded his visit, instead observing propriety? What a loss to biography!

But then, Ms. Barker’s resolute refusal to unbend, to speculate even a little, to probe the dark heart of a Wordsworth who left behind in France a mistress, an illegitimate daughter, and a granddaughter, robs her biography of a certain humanity, the desire to know more than the evidence itself can yield. If Mr. Johnston’s conjectural method goes too far, Ms. Barker’s empiricist approach does not go far enough.

crollyson@nysun.com