Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 ‘Democracy’ in Somerset and beyond
- 2 Politics, sensibility and the quest for adequacy of language
- 3 The heart of Lyrical Ballads
- 4 The Prelude: a poem in process
- 5 Words or images? Blake's representation of history
- 6 Blake, Coleridge and ‘The Riddle of the World’
- 7 Challenges from the non-verbal and return to the Word
- 8 The Nature of Hazlitt's taste
- 9 Jane Austen's progress
- 10 Languages of memory and passion: Tennyson, Gaskell and the Brontës
- 11 George Eliot and the future of language
- Index
4 - The Prelude: a poem in process
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 ‘Democracy’ in Somerset and beyond
- 2 Politics, sensibility and the quest for adequacy of language
- 3 The heart of Lyrical Ballads
- 4 The Prelude: a poem in process
- 5 Words or images? Blake's representation of history
- 6 Blake, Coleridge and ‘The Riddle of the World’
- 7 Challenges from the non-verbal and return to the Word
- 8 The Nature of Hazlitt's taste
- 9 Jane Austen's progress
- 10 Languages of memory and passion: Tennyson, Gaskell and the Brontës
- 11 George Eliot and the future of language
- Index
Summary
For many readers, the most distinctive feature of The Prelude is its status as one of the first English autobiographies. There had been predecessors, of course, often owing their existence to the religious fashion for telling the story of one's career before one had in some way received enlightenment; but there was an increasing interest in the possibility of achieving the aim expressed memorably by Rousseau in his Confessions:
I have begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.
In the decades following, it was probably difficult to embark on any similar enterprise without thinking of Rousseau's words: certainly they often provided a criterion by which subsequent attempts of the kind might be judged. But by the same token, they furnished a stick with which to beat a writer such as Wordsworth if it was suspected that he had been less than open in his account, as when Émile Legouis's book The Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770–1798, which appeared in English translation in 1897, revealed that while in France Wordsworth had fathered an illegitimate daughter by Annette Vallon. This discovery caused scholars to look again at the whole corpus of his work and to note the existence of the tale ‘Vaudracour and Julia’, first published in 1820 and evidently written as part of the 1805 Prelude.
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- Romanticism, Revolution and LanguageThe Fate of the Word from Samuel Johnson to George Eliot, pp. 61 - 79Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009