Abrams, Meyer Howard. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1973: 28-32.
In a passage in the third book of The Prelude Wordsworth, looking back from maturity upon his youthful experience, is able to recognize the early signs of his election into the society of poet-prophets, as well as early evidences of the divinely creative interaction between his mind and the visible universe which was to be his destined theme:
I was a chosen son.
For hither I had come with holy powers
And faculties, whether to work or feel:
To apprehend all passions and all moods
Which time, and place, and season do impress
Upon the visible universe, and work
Like changes there by force of my own mind....
I had a world about me; 'twas my own,
I made it; for it only liv'd to me,
And to the God who look'd into my mind....
Some call'd it madness: such, indeed, it was ...
If prophesy be madness; if things view'd
By Poets of old time, and higher up
By the first men, earth's first inhabitants,
May in these tutor'd days no more be seen
With undisorder'd sight.
... Of Genius, Power,
Creation and Divinity itself
I have been speaking, for my theme has been
What pass'd within me....
This is, in truth, heroic argument,
And genuine prowess; which I wish'd to touch
With hand however weak; but in the main
It lies far hidden from the reach of words.
It is noteworthy that in the line, "This is, in truth, heroic argument," Wordsworth echoes, in order to supersede, Milton's claim in the introduction to Book IX of Paradise Lost that his was "argument/Not less but more Heroic than the wrath/ Of stern Achilles." And in this instance it is unmistakable that what Wordsworth vaunts is the height of his given argument, not the adequacy of his powers to accomplish a task which may require more than even poetry can manage.
An extraordinary theme, surely, for a more-than-heroic poem! Yet the more we attend to the central claims of some of Wordsworth's major contemporaries, in Germany as well as in England, the less idiosyncratic do Wordsworth's pronouncements seem. For a number of these writers also put themselves forward as members of the small company of poet-prophets and bards; they measured their enterprise against the earlier revelation of present, past, and future things, either as presented in the Bible itself or as represented by Milton or other Biblical poets; and they undertook, either in epic or some other major genre—in drama, in prose romance, or in the visionary "greater Ode"—radically to recast, into terms appropriate to the historical and intellectual circumstances of their own age, the Christian pattern of the fall, the redemption, and the emergence of a new earth which will constitute a restored paradise. Take even Wordsworth's startling figure for this last event, the renovative marriage between mind and nature whose annunciation will arouse "the sensual from their sleep/ Of death." In his "Dejection: An Ode" Coleridge wrote that the inner condition of total vitality he called "Joy,"
is the spirit and the power,
Which, wedding Nature to us, gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven,
Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud.
Blake prefaced the concluding chapter of Jerusalem with the voice of the Bard arousing Albion from his "sleep of death," so that he may unite with his separated female emanation:
England! awake! awake! awake!
Jerusalem thy Sister calls!
Why wilt thou sleep the sleep of death?
And close her from thy ancient walls....
And now the time returns again:
Our souls exult & London's towers,
Receive the Lamb of God to dwell
In Englands green & pleasant bowers.
The poem closes with the dawn of "the Eternal Day" of a universal resurrection in a restored paradise, illuminated by an etching of Albion and Jerusalem in an embrace of love. At the conclusion of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound the regeneration of man in a renovated world has for its central symbol the union of Prometheus and Asia, an act in which all the cosmos sympathetically participates.
Comparable are two German works which were written in the latter 1790s, almost contemporaneously with the earliest version of Wordsworth's Prospectus. In a climactic passage of Hölderlin's Hyperion, the young poet-hero, inspired, cries out to "holy Nature":
Let all be changed from its Foundations! Let the new world spring from the root of humanity! ... They will come, Nature, thy men. A rejuvenated people will make thee young again, too, and thou wilt be as its bride.... There will be only one beauty; and man and Nature will unite in one all-embracing divinity.
Novalis' unfinished romance, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, incorporates a Märchen (fairy tale) which epitomizes the theme of the whole. At the end of this complex allegory it is announced that "the old times are returning," in which the Gardens of the Hesperides "will bloom again and the golden fruit send forth its fragrance," and that "out of suffering the new world is born" in which there will be no more woe. The event symbolizing this consummation is the nuptial embrace of the king and queen, which becomes epidemic:
In the meantime the throne had imperceptibly changed into a magnificent bridal bed.... The king embraced his blushing beloved, and the people followed the example of the king and caressed one another.
In one of his Fragments Novalis also stated flatly that all "the higher philosophy is concerned with the marriage of Nature and Mind." The philosopher Schelling looks forward to just such a union between intellect and nature, as well as to the poet-seer adequate to sing this great consummation in an epic poem:
Now, after long wanderings [philosophy] has regained the memory of nature and of nature's former unity with knowledge.... Then there will no longer be any difference between the world of thought and the world of reality. There will be one world, and the peace of the golden age will make itself known for the first time in the harmonious union of all sciences.... Perhaps he will yet come who is to sing the great heroic poem, comprehending in spirit what was, what is, what will be, the kind of poem attributed to the seers of yore.
It begins to be apparent that Wordsworth's holy marriage, far from being unique, was a prominent period-metaphor which served a number of major writers, English and German, as the central figure in a similar complex of ideas concerning the history and destiny of man and the role of the visionary poet as both herald and inaugurator of a new and supremely better world.