Extract

Published posthumously in July 1850, three months after the death of William Wordsworth, The Prelude was the culmination of over fifty years of creative effort. Taking its central subject as “the growth of a poet’s mind”, The Prelude is an autobiographical poem that details the development of Wordsworth as a poet. It represents Wordsworth’s most sustained self-examination and his spiritual exploration of human nature. The poem is, in Stephen Gill’s perceptive words, “a self-conscious artefact” (1991, p. 3). […]

The Prelude is a product inspired by Wordsworth’s “dear Friend”, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and was intended to be an introduction or “preparatory poem” to the greater philosophical epic, The Recluse. Coleridge referred to The Prelude in his letter to Lady Beaumont as “the biographical, or philosophico-biographical Poem to be prefixed or annexed to the Recluse” (Collected Letters, 1956-1971, II, p. 1104). In his publication of The Excursion (1814), with the subtitle “Being a portion of The Recluse”, Wordsworth explained the subordinate position of the still unpublished Prelude within the scheme of the larger and uncompleted magnum opus, The Recluse, of which The Excursion is the second and the only complete part. According to the Preface to The Excursion, The Prelude and The Recluse would “have the same kind of relation to each other” as an “Ante-chapel” has to a “body of a gothic Church” (Excursion, 2007, p. 38). […]