The Prelude: an introduction

1.  Wordsworth's spiritual epic

A poetic contemplation of the process of creation itself and the growth of an individual mind. It is a chronicle specifically of Wordsworth's own growth, and in doing this Wordsworth becomes the first modern poet and the beginning of an aesthetic revolution. 

2.  Poetic Autobiography: "a growth of a poet's mind"

First of all, although The Prelude’s history of ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’ proceeds along roughly chronological lines, the process by which the poem itself grew was highly non-linear, as one manuscript state was fed back into the writing process as past material to be worked over and elaborated. This is of course true of any revision process to a greater or lesser extent, but assumes a special significance in the case of autobiography, where the text’s re-collection of itself becomes interwoven with the recollection of pre-textual material. Moreover, the delayed and staggered reception of The Prelude may be seen as a further extension of this structural system: the text had to be not simply read but recalled, resummoned from the past–quite literally in the case of the De Selincourt edition –before the conditions for the entry of the reader into its recursive system of transmission could be fully activated. Secondly, the fact that the writing of The Prelude originated in the context of Wordsworth’s failure to make headway with The Recluse, the envisioned magnum opus whose completion would be ‘of sufficient importance to justify me in giving my own history to the world’ (EY 470), assumes a different aspect in light of this compositional history. Rather than simply a precipitating cause dictating a preliminary retreat to a ‘theme / Single, and of determin’d bounds’ (1805 Prelude Book 1, lines 669–70) before embarking on the ultimate goal of writing The Recluse, ‘a literary Work that might live’ (Excursion 38), that failure appears as the abiding ground, early and late,of The Prelude’s coming-into-being.

3. Texual History

Wordsworth worked on this poem for more than forty years. His first drafts date back to 1798, and the last large-scale revision ended in 1839. Seventeen major Prelude manuscripts survive in the Wordsworth Library at Grasmere. There are two principal drafts of the poem, the 1805 Prelude and the 1850 Prelude; someone who refers to The Prelude is citing one or the other of these two. However, a third version, the two-part Prelude of 1799, contains many treasures of its own and is studied for evidence of progression and change in the mind of Wordsworth even though it is not a primary text. The manuscripts of 1799 and 1805 both indicate that Wordsworth considered his work complete, but he continued to make revisions for another thirty-four years, creating the 1850 Prelude. He had originally thought of the poem as an end piece, and then as a preparatory poem for an epic philosophical work called The Recluse, which he never completed; thus, Wordsworth never gave The Prelude a title. His wife, Mary, supplied the title after his death.

4. Restoration

In The Prelude, Wordsworth sets up a cycle of development, crisis, and recovery. This recovery moves him to a state of existence higher than the initial one-there is an added sense of awe, a heightened awareness. This new sensitivity gives meaning to human existence where there was none before, where there was only suffering and loss. The central philosophical question of The Prelude is answered-how to understand human existence in the quagmire of decline and destruction we see everywhere around us.

5. Spots of Time

Throughout the poem are " spots of time," as Wordsworth called them. These were intense, revelatory, almost hallucinogenic moments that descended on him occasionally, in natural surroundings, bringing him closer to nature, helping him comprehend it and define his own relationship to it.

"As it stands in Book XI of 1805, the assertion “"There are in our existence spots of time . . .", though of course highly impressive, is removed a very long way from the poetry of Book 1 with which it had originally been connected, and has to take a structural weight that it cannot easily bear. In 1799, by contrast, it is at the centre of Wordsworth's thinking-a support alike for his faith in the value of primal experience, and for the further definition of Part II as he goes on to explore more fully the role of imagination. In its early form the passage is brief and to the point, half the length of the more pompous later version:

There are in our existence spots of time
Which with distinct preeminence retain
A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed
By trivial occupations and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Especially the imaginative power-
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
Such moments chiefly seem to have their date
In our first childhood."

from Jonathan Wordsworth, "The Growth of a Poet's Mind"; in The Cornell Library Journal 11 (Spring 1970): pp. 7-8.

6. Geoffrey Hartman on the Romance of Nature

Nature, for Wordsworth, is not an "object" but a presence and a power; a motion and a spirit; not something to be worshiped and consumed, but always a guide leading beyond itself. This guidance starts in earliest childhood. The boy of Prelude I is fostered alike by beauty and by fear. Through beauty, nature often makes the boy feel at home, for, as in the Great "Ode," his soul is alien to this world. But through fear, nature reminds the boy from where he came, and prepares him, having lost heaven, also to lose nature. The boy of Prelude I, who does not yet know he must suffer this loss as well, is warned by nature itself of the solitude to come.

7. M.H. Abrams on "two consciousness" in The Prelude

Wordsworth does not tell his life as a simple narrative in past time but as the present remembrance of things past, in which forms and sensations "throw back our life" and evoke the former self which coexists with the altered present self in a multiple awareness that Wordsworth calls “two consciousnesses:

There is a wide “vacancy" between the I now and the I then, 

Which yet have such self-presence in my mind
That, sometimes, when 1 think of them, 1 seem
Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself
And of some other Being.

The poet is aware of the near impossibility of disengaging “the naked recollection of that time" from the intrusions of “after-meditation." In a fine and subtle figure for the interdiffusion of the two consciousnesses, he describes himself as one bending from a drifting boat on a still water perplexed to distinguish actual objects at the bottom of the lake from surface reflections of the environing scene, from the tricks and refractions of the water currents, and from his own intrusive but inescapable image (that is, his present awareness). Thus “incumbent o’er the surface of past time" the poet, seeking the elements of continuity between his two disparate selves, conducts a persistent exploration of the nature and significance of memory, of his power to sustain freshness of sensation and his "first creative sensibility" against the deadening effect of habit and analysis, and of manifestations of the enduring and the eternal within the realm of change and time. Only intermittently does the narrative order coincide with the order of actual occurrence. Instead Wordsworth proceeds by sometimes bewildering ellipses, fusion; and as he says, "motions retrograde" in time.

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