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Wordsworth, The Two-Part Prelude

March 31, 2016

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earlier life: and have just finished that part in which I speak of my residence at the University; ...This Poem will not be published these many years, and never during my lifetime, till I have finished a larger and more important work to which it is tributary.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. (Wordworth to Thomas de Quincey, 6 March 1804)

2. 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)

3. Harold Bloom on 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)

4. 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)

5. 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 Thoretical and Critical edited by James Olney, p.38.)

Select Bibliography

Bennett, A. William Wordsworth in Context. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Print.

Eakin, Sybil S. "The Spots of Time in Early Versions of the Prelude." Studies in Romanticism 12 (1973): 389-405. Print.

Jay, Paul. Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes. Cornell UP, 1984. Print.

Johnston, Kenneth R. Wordsworth and the Recluse. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1984. Print.

Nichols, Ashton. The Revolutionary "I": Wordsworth and the Politics of Self-Presentation. Palgrave Macmillan, 1998. Print.

Olney, James. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton UP, 1980. Print.

Richardson, Alan. "Wordsworth at the Crossroads: "Spots of Time" in the "Two-Part Prelude"." The Wordsworth Circle 19.1 (1988): 15. Print.

Williams, Nicholas M. "'Glad Animal Movements': Motion in Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey' and 'the Two-Part Prelude'." Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 10.1 (2012): 11-28. Print.