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Spengemann on The Prelude 1. These conditions--the need to locate the fixed personal center that lends pattern and value to unstable reality, and the necessity of approaching that center through one's own moving experiences-stipulate autobiography as the prime instrument of Romantic knowledge, and movement as its method(77). 2. Since movement is unavoidable, Wordsworth must be sure to choose a mode of conveyance that, like Augustine's faithful action and Rousseau's feeling action, is consonant with the truth it aims to apprehend. For Wordsworth, as for all the Romantics, the cognitive vehicle most capable of carrying the questing soul to truth is poetry. The poetic imagination is a higher power, creative, Godlike, equivalent to moral power and divinity...Perfect poetry is also associated with true being...If the youthful self is passionate and the adult self is reflective, true poetry spans these poles(78-79). 3. That(the autobiographical) solution is to find within the autobiographical action itself, rather that in its ultimate form, isolated, epiphanic moments when the temporally dispersed elements of passion and reflection, of movement and fixity, or protagonist and narrator, are reconciled in symbolic equipoise...In these isolated, purely poetic instants, Wordsworth manages to glimpse and preserve that beatific state of true being that his narrative has been seeking all along. 4. To say that The Prelude fails to do autobiographically what Wordsworth wanted it to do and what he maintains it has done, is not to say, by any means, that it fails as a poem. The passages which re-enact the boy’s Natural experience provide ample evidence that the man has indeed managed to retain or recover the poetic powers he attributes, rightly or wrongly, to the circumstances of his rearing. The point is that Wordsworth could fully realize those powers only by re-experiencing imaginatively the situations to which he ascribed them. He sought to fetch invigorating thoughts from the recollection of his early life, not for their own sake, but to run them poetically through his entire life to the present, where, validated by the life they had redeemed, they could provide a firm basis for some ampler argument. The Prelude, in other words, was intended to be a means to something beyond itself— a prelude to something else. Instead, it became a prelude to itself and it did so in a very special, peculiarly Romantic sense. Augustine story of his conversion is a prelude to itself: it recounts the genesis of the person who narrates it. Wordsworth’s autobiography leads back into itself rather than on to something else because he never could complete it. The self he set out to discover philosophically, he ended up realizing poetically; it could not be abstracted from the words which are its cause and adequate symbol. What was to have been a prelude to his life’s work, a work that would “endure” because its truth was timeless, became his life’s work, one whose truth is inseparable from its enduring poetic action(91).
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