Wordsworth and The Prelude

Overview

Arguably the single most important long poem by a British Romantic poet, The Prelude
occupied Wordsworth for most of his life. First sketches date from around 1796; a two-
part version was completed by 1799, and a version in thirteen books by 1805, which
incorporated for the first time Wordsworth's response to the French Revolution.
Revisions to the poem continued to occupy him intermittently for another thirty years, but
the poem was not published until three months after his death in 1850, under a title
supplied by his wife. The poem thus has an equivocal status. Since, of Wordsworth's
contemporaries, almost no one other than Coleridge and De Quincey were able to read
the poem, Wordsworth's meditations on his self-development in the context of the politics
and culture of his time, remained unknown and without influence until late in the
nineteenth century, by which time the import of Wordsworth's concerns had long since
become a question of history.

The poem has been treated as a document reflecting Wordsworth's psychobiography

(Onorato) and his aesthetics of nature (Hartmann). More recently (Chandler, Lui),
historicist criticism has focused with more precision on how Wordsworth engages with
contemporary events, both at the local level (e.g., the peasantry of the Lake District) and
on a broader canvas (in handling the crisis of the Revolution and its aftermath). At the
same time, questions have been raised about Wordsworth's political stance and whether
he attempts to position himself as a historical figure in his poem. Opposed to such
readings of Wordsworth's intentions, other scholars (Bate, Kroeber) suggest that the focus
on history (especially the historicist's production of "nature" as a cultural category)
effaces Wordsworth's ecological perspective, from which we have perhaps much to learn
-- especially in the 1990s. In line with this approach, it could also be argued that
Wordsworth's rhetoric in The Prelude argues for a more situated and embodied
conception of experience than we have been prepared to recognize until recently.

Recent critics and editors of the poem (Parrish, Gill, Wu) have tended to prefer the earlier
1805 (or even 1799) version of the poem over the heavily revised 1850 version. In this
respect, Wordsworth criticism has foregrounded a set of bibliographical issues that is
now manifest in Romantic studies generally, first versions usually being printed in
preference to a version authorized by a poet's "final" intentions. While this reinserts a
poem within the (non-canonical) process of textual production and reception, often with
interesting results (cf. McGann's anthology of Romantic literature), it may mystify the
process of canon-formation by obscuring the revision process through which a text
emerges from the context in which it was produced.

In our study of this poem, then, and its relation to Wordsworth's status and reputation as a
poet, we will focus in particular on three issues:

1. The revision history of the poem, and its place in an ongoing debate about the editing
and publication of Romantic texts. We will examine manuscript evidence (available in
the Cornell Wordsworth editions), as well as printed versions of the poem, and consider
Wordsworth's revisionary practices in successive versions of the poem.

2. The history/nature dimension of The Prelude. How far is Wordsworth aware of, or
interested in, the historical forces shaping the London, the France, or the many rural
scenes of The Prelude? We will examine how such issues as changes in land use, the
plight of the rural and urban poor, or the Revolution, are represented in contemporary
documentation, and set these alongside Wordsworth's accounts. We will test Bewell's
claim that would see Wordsworth as a type of late 18th Century anthropologist in this
poem.

3. A phenomenology of Wordsworth's experiences in The Prelude. To what extent do

issues of self-presentation, Wordsworth's avowed aim of justifying his poetic vocation, or
his insistence on celebrating the imagination, vitiate his handling of experiential
evidence? Or does Wordsworth's poem point to a more situated and embodied conception
of existence, a type of internalized ecology of the self-in-nature?