"Deep Distresses is a psycho-biographical and cultural study of William Wordsworth's middle years and poetry that shows the poet's brother, Captain John Wordsworth, and the painter-aristocrat Sir George Beaumont to be the two pillars of the poet's life and poetry, rather than the marginal presences of other biographies. Even though today we assess the poetry of 1800-1807 as arguably the greatest by any poet writing in English of the entire nineteenth century, for the poet himself it was a period of stress, sadness, and failure."--Jacket.