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1. The Prelude as "a sort of portico" to The Recluse The time taken to compose The Prelude straddled the writing of the Prospectus, and the completed Prelude was conceived as an integral part of the overall structure whose “ design and scope" Wordsworth specified in that poetic manifesto. “ The Poem on the growth of your own mind," as Coleridge recalled the plan in 1815, “was as the ground-plat and the Roots, out of which the Recluse was to have sprung up as the Tree"-two distinct works, but forming “one compleat Whole." The role of The Prelude, as Wordsworth himself describes his grand design, is to recount the mental growth of a “ transitory Being," culminating in his achievement of a “ Vision," and in the recognition that his mission is to impart the circumstances and results of that vision in the enduring form of an unprecedented poem. 2. The Prelude as a poetic equivalent of Bildungsroman or of Künstlerroman 3. The Prelude as an achoronological narrative. 4. The protagonist as one who has been elected to play a special role in a providential plot. 5. The poet himself as the examplary poet-prophet in a difficult time. 6. The three stages of the poet's mental growth There is a process of unified mental development which, although at times suspended, remains a continuum; this process is shattered by a crisis of apathy and despair; but the mind then recovers an integrity which, despite admitted losscs, is represented as a level higher than the initial unity, in that the mature mind possesses powers, together with an added range, depth, and humanity, which are the products of the critical experiences it has undergone. 7. The Prelude as an attempt to overcome a crisis of identity. At Cambridge he had reachecl a stage of life, “an eminence," in which he had felt that he was “a chosen Son" (III, 82 ff. 169), and on a walk home from a dance during a summer drawn he had experienced an illumination that he should be, “else sinning greatly, / A dedicated Spirit" (IV, 343-44); but for what chosen, or to what dedicated, had not been specified. Now, however, the recovery from the crisis of despair after his commitment to thc French Revolution comprises the insight that his destiny is not one of engagement with what is blazoned “ with the pompous names / Of power and action" in “ the stir / And tumult of the world," but one of withdrawal from the world of action so that he may meditate in solitude: his role in life requires not involvement, but detachment. And that role is to be one of the “ Poets, even as Prophets," each of whom is endowed with the power “ to perceive / Something unseen before," and so to write a new kind of poetry in a new poetic style. “Of these, said I, shall be my Song; of these . . . / Will I record the praises": the ordinary world of lowly, suffering men and of commonplace or trivial things transformed into “a new world . . . fit / To be transmitted," of dignity, love, and heroic grandeur (XII, 220-379). 8. Wordsworth's second revelation on Mount Snowdon As he breaks through the cover of clouds the light of the moon “upon the turf / Fell like a f!ash," and he sees the total scene as “ the perfect image of a mighty Mind" in its free and continuously creative reciprocity with its milieu, “ Willing to work and to be wrought upon" and so to “ create / A like existence" (XIII, 36-119)' What has been revealed to Wordsworth in this symbolic landscape is the grand locus of The Recluse which he announced in the Prospectus, “The Mind of Man- / My haunt, and the main region of my song," as well as the “ high argument" of that poem, the union between the mind and the external world and the resulting “creation... which they with blended might / Accomplish." The event which Wordsworth selects for the climactic revelation in The Prelude, then, is precisely the moment of the achievement of “ this Vision" by“ the transitory Being" whose life he had, in the Prospectus, undertaken to describe as an integral part of The Recluse. 9. Wordsworth's as a metaphoric wayfarer In one of these, The Prelude represents the life which the poet narrates as a se1f-educative journey, "from stage to stage / Advancing," in which his early development had been "progress on the se1f-same path," the crisis following the French Revolution had been “"a stride at once / Into another region," and the terminus is his achievement of maturity in "the discipline / And consummation of the Poet’'s mind." In the second application, the poet repeatedly figures his own imaginative enterprise, the act of conceiving and composing The Prelude itse1f, as a perilous quest through the uncharted regions of his own mind.
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