The Prelude (Book 1): Introductory

Class
Presented by
Poulomi Modak
Junior Research Fellow
Department of English
Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University
A BRIEF OUTLINE OF THE DISCUSSION

 Textual History
 The Colossal Structure of the Poem
 Autobiographical Poem
 Memory Poem
 Notes
 References
 Further Readings
 Disclaimer
 TEXTUAL HISTORY

The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, an

autobiographical poem in blank verse, is a memoir in
fourteen books.
 Posthumously published and known to the poet’s circle
during his lifetime simply as “the poem to Coleridge”,
The Prelude was originally constructed to be a “sort of
portico” to The Recluse.
The poem was initially intended as an introduction to
The Recluse, a vast work which Wordsworth planned but
never completed.
The first version containing two books was published in
1799. The second version with thirteen books was
published in 1805 and the final revised version was
published in 1850 with fourteen books.
 THE COLOSSAL STRUCTURE OF THE
POEM

The poem begins in,

revisits and finally
returns in spirit to the
world of his childhood
and youth and to the
undisturbed beauty
and timeless Exclusively
simplicity of autobiographical in tone,
Cumberland. the poem quite
unconventionally does not
proceed in terms of strict
chronological order of
time.
The Prelude is organised not chronologically but
thematically. M.H. Abrams succinctly writes in
Nutural Supernaturalism:

The Prelude .....is ordered in three stages. There is a

process of mental development which, although at
times suspended, remains a continuum; this process
is violently broken by a crisis of apathy and
despair; but the mind then recovers an integrity
which, despite admitted losses is represented as a
level higher than the initial unity, in that the mature
mind possesses powers, together with an added
range, depth, and sensitivity of awareness, which
are the products of the
critical experiences it has undergone. (77)
•BOOK 1 and 2: the infancy, childhood, and school
time;
•BOOK 3: time spent in Cambridge University;
•BOOK 4: Summer vacations;
•BOOK 5: detailed descriptions of the books that the
poet read;
•BOOK 6: his walking tour through the Alps and
consequently the epiphanic revelations;
•BOOK 7 and 8: integration with the lives of
downtrodden, the common men, and
finally realisation of how the Love of
Nature leads to the Love of Man;
•BOOK 9 and 10: the poet’s political awakening in
France and the consequent horrors;
his disappointment with the bloody
outcome of the French Revolution;
•BOOK 11, 12, and 13: the climax of the poem as
these books record
“Imagination, How Impaired
and Restored”;
•BOOK 14: conclusion: self and other exist in harmonious
balance.
THE PRELUDE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL POEM

The Book 1 reflects the poet’s quest for a

conventional epic theme, moving to an evocation
of his own childhood that directs him less by logic
than by imaginative association to his primordial
subject, the poet’s own development as a poet
and the eventual forces that shaped his
imagination (Birch 801). Therefore, the first book
is more about the portrait of the artist as a young
boy.

 The poem begins as a lyrical composition for a

preparation of an epic style that gradually
culminates into a Romantic ‘self-biography’.

 This “lyrical bildungsroman” is directed by

Hartleian principles of Imagination, Affection,
Sentiment, and Reflection.
 The concept of the Association of Ideas that David
Hartley explained in Observations on Man, His Frame,
His Duty and His Expectations had an enormous
impact upon Wordsworth. The poet expounded how the
associations of affection, sentiment, and reflection of
early childhood through the imaginary vision helped in
matured times:
So feeling comes in aid
Of feeling, and diversity of strength
Attends us, if but once we have been strong. (Prelude, XI,
326-28)
 In the beginning of 1799, Wordsworth after a prolonged
consideration selected his intellectual development as his
subject. The memoir of the growth of his own mind records
the mystical history of his poetics, his aspirations and hopes,
his travels and trajectories, his inward conflicts and
epiphanies, and his self-awakening and gloomy dejections.

Sometimes it suits me better to invent

A tale from my own heart, more near akin
To my own passions and habitual thoughts;
Some variegated story, in the main
Lofty, but the unsubstantial structure melts
Before the very sun that brightens it,
Mist into air dissolving. (Prelude, I, 221-27)
 THE PRELUDE: A MEMORY POEM

 The narration is based on the poet’s own past

memories and is exclusively occupied with the sense
of “egotistical sublime”.

 Wordsworth begins with the mind as a “white

paper” (following John Locke), engulfs the extrinsic
sensible objects, and finally recollects and records in
tranquility.
 Reminiscence is a reference to this process whereby
the recollection of happy boyhood episodes becomes
pleasurable in and for itself the Romantic poet gives
himself up to the pleasure of remembering.

 In the first two books of The Prelude Wordsworth

describes the natural influences on a young boy . The
poet recollects the happy incidents which helped him
to visualise nature as an all engrossing living entity.
 The poet proceeds further to recollect the
paradisal state of childhood which is glorified as the
golden age of celestial radiance.

 The nostalgic poet recalls his intimate

correspondence with the nature by bathing in small
stream or basking in the sun during the summer
days.

The memory of the incident of the stolen boat is

one of the famous and most vivid passages in the
poem that culminates:
“With trembling oars I turned,
And though the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,
And through the meadows homeward went, in
grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being;” (Prelude, I,
385-93)
EPIPHANY: A
comparatively Modern
term, epiphany is a
sudden revelation of EGOTISTICAL SUBLIM: John
spiritual manifestation. Keats coined the phrase in
Wordsworth used the his criticism of Wordsworth
phrase “spots of time” as a self-aggrandizing
to delineate the egoist as opposed to the
epiphanic moments mighty “negative
during his tranquil capability” of Shakespeare.
association with nature;
as the poet, unlike
Coleridge,
acknowledges no God
outside natural
phenomena.
 REFERENCES

This presentation is prepared with the borrowings from

following sources:

1. Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and

Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1971.

2. Birch, Dinah (ed.). The Oxford Companion to English

Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

3. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. New York: Penguin

Classics, 2010.
 Further Readings:

1. Max Byrd, London Transformed: Images of the City

in the Eighteenth Century (New Haveii, 1978).

2. Jonathan Wordsworth, Michael C. Jaya, & Robert

Woof, William Wordsworth and the Age of English
Romanticism (New Brutiswick and London, 1987).

3. David P. Haney. “The Emergence of the

Autobiographical Figure in "The Prelude", Book 1”
Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring,
1981), pp. 33-63.

4. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition

and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York,
1971).
DISCLAIMER

This is not entirely an original work. Parts of the

concepts/ ideas/ information/ illustrations/
phraseologies are derived from several sources.
THANK YOU