The Prelude

"The Prelude" is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life without publishing it. He never gave it a title; he called it the "Poem (title not yet fixed upon) to Coleridge" and in his letters to Dorothy Wordsworth as "the poem on the growth of my own mind." The poem was unknown to the general public until published three months after Wordsworth's death in 1850, the final name given to it by his wife Mary.

Versions

Three versions of the poem are known to exist:
* The 1850 version, published shortly after Wordsworth's death, in 14 books.
* The 1805 version, which was found and printed by Ernest de Sélincourt in 1926, in 13 books.
* The 1799 version. This is a much shorter two part version composed 1798-99.

There are no major differences in structure or content between the 1805 and 1850 versions. Wordsworth spent 45 years "polishing the style and qualifying some of its radical statements about the divine sufficiency of the human mind in its communion with nature". [From "The Norton Anthology of English Literature", Sixth Edition 1993] Thus, it may be argued that the 1850 version, albeit more polished, is somewhat tame compared to the 1805 version.

tructure

It was intended to be the prologue to a long three-part philosophical poem Wordsworth planned to call "The Recluse". Though Wordsworth planned this project when he was in his late 20s, he went to his grave at 80 years old having written to some completion only "The Prelude" and the second part ("The Excursion"), leaving no more than fragments of the rest.

Content

The work is a poetic reflection on Wordsworth's own sense of his poetic vocation as it developed over the course of his life. But its focus and mood present a sharp fundamental fall away from the neoclassical and into the Romantic. Whilst Milton (mentioned by name in line 169 of Book One) in Paradise Lost rewrites God's creation and The Fall of Man so as to "justify the wayes of God to man," Wordsworth chooses his own mind and imagination as a subject worthy of epic.

This spiritual autobiography holds Wordsworth's persistent metaphor that life is a circular journey whose end is "to arrive where we started / And know that place for the first time" (T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," lines 241-42). Wordsworth's Prelude opens with a literal journey during his manhood whose chosen goal is the Vale of Grasmere. The Prelude narrates a number of later journeys, most notably the crossing of the Alps in book VI and, in the beginning of the final book, the climactic ascent of Snowdon. In the course of the poem, such literal journeys become the metaphorical vehicle for a spiritual journey--the quest in the poet's memory.

Although the episodes of the Prelude are recognizable events from Wordsworth's life, they are interpreted in retrospect, reordered in sequence, retold as dramas involving the interaction between the mind and nature and between the creative imagination and the force of history. Through the journeys Wordsworth tries to reconstitute the grounds of hope in a dark time of post-revolutionary reaction and despair. [From "The Norton Anthology of English Literature", Eighth Edition 2006]

References