The Prelude: an introduction

1. Wordsworth's own comments on the poem about his early life

I am now writing a poem on my own earlier life: and have just finished that part in which I speak of my residence at the University; ...This Poem will not be published these many years, and never during my lifetime, till I have finished a larger and more important work to which it is tributary. Of this larger work I have written one Book and several scattered fragments: it is a moral and philosophical Poem; the subject whatever I find most interesting in Nature, Man, and Society, and most adapted to poetic illustration. To this work I mean to devote the prime of my life, and the chief force of my mind. (Wordsworth to Thomas de Quincey, 6 March 1804)

2. The Textual History of The Prelude

3. Kenneth Johnston's comments on The Prelude

Initially, Wordsworth's writing in self-defense consisted of approximately 250 lines of recollections of some half-dozen exciting childhood experiences, which make up about half of Part I of the two-part Prelude of 1798-99 as now reconstituted. He had begun writing autobiographical recollections in early 1798, to supply the Pedlar with the profundity of natural insight necessary to interpret Margaret's suffering. But what he had attributed to the Pedlar he now applied directly himself, as a way toward understanding his own suffering at being unable to raise the grand edifice on which he believed his greatness would be founded. (Wordsworth and The Recluse, p. 55)

4. Harold Bloom on the nature of The Prelude

The Prelude is not a tragic poem but an autobiographical myth-making. Dominating The Prelude is the natural miracle of memory as an instrumentality by which the self is saved. Supreme among Wordsworth's inventions is the myth of renovating "spots of time," crucial in the "Intimations" ode and "Tintern Abbey," and the entire basis for the imaginative energy of The Prelude. ("Introduction," Chelsea House Modern Critical Interpretations Series on The Prelude, pp. 3-4)

5. Paul Jay's understanding of The Prelude's narrative dynamics

We can now see that Bloom's description of the "saving movement" of Wordsworth's poetry as "backwards" inadequately captures the full scope of the poet's inner journey. For the movement both of his thought and of his work, as we have seen, is hardly linear. The past exists for him in the present as the pretext (literally so, after he initially writes it) for an operation of the mind that repeats a version of it for the present purpose of helping him to become the poet he once was. There is, for Wordsworth, however, no "where" to go back to. Since his restoration depends on an imaginative repetition of the past his thoughts are directed inward as well as "backwards," so that his movement is more like a spiral. While the pretext of Wordsworth's poem is that becoming depends on "returning," in actuality it depends upon the visionary and linguistic powers of his imagination as they work in the present moments of writing. It is in these moments that the poem's subject is produced and invented, and the poem's disjointed form is a measure of the difficulty of such a production. (Being in the Text, p.82)

6. Georges Gusdorf on Autobiography

Autobiography is not simple repetition of the past as it was, for recollection brings us not the past itself but only the presence in spirit of a world forever gone. Recapitulation of a life lived claims to be valuable for the one who lived it, already far distant, and doubtless incomplete, distorted furthermore by the fact that the man who remembers his past has not been for a long time the same being, the child or adolescent, who lived that past. ("Conditions and Limits of Autobiography" in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical edited by James Olney, p.38.)

7. On "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."

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

The characteristic form which Wordsworth developed to probe into the past is the "spots of time"...but the "spots of time" can also be viewed as a literary form...at its simplest level the "spots" is the record of a concrete past event used to illustrate some more general statements about the past...On one level, at least, one could view this memory as a sort of anecdote, called forth in the poet's mind by association and framed on each side by general commentary about the course of his life. At bottom, however, the passage strives to accomplish more than it at first pretends, for the anecdote itself must create the transition from the offhanded introductory remark to the culminating statement. By the end of the passage, with its celebration of the ability of the past to project its powers into the present, Wordsworth has shifted context from casual reminiscence to religious vision. (Herbert Lindenberger, On Wordsworth's Prelude, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963)

8. Geoffrey Hartman on The Prelude

A very small group...has pointed to the deeply paradoxical or problematic character of Wordsworth's dealings with Nature and suggested that what he calls Imagination may be intrinsically opposed to images culled or developed from Nature. This last and rarest position seems to me quite close to the truth, yet I do not feel it conflicts totally with the more traditional readings, which stress the poet's adherence to Nature. My purpose is to show, via three important episodes of The Prelude, that Wordsworth came to realize that Nature itself led him beyond Nature; and how and when the realization was achieved. The poet's sense of a reality in Nature is kept alive by the very fact that Nature itself weans his mind, and especially his poetic mind, from its early dependence on immediate sensuous stimuli.

(Geoffrey H. Hartman, Modern Philology, LIX, 1962: 214-24)

Related Links

Book I-II of The Prelude Book III-V of The Prelude Book chapters or Journal Articles on The Prelude My own article on Autobiography. Take a look at pp. 183-190 dealing with The Prelude

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