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Revolution and Romanticism
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A facsimile reprint in the Revolution & Romanticism series chosen and introduced by Jonathan Wordsworth ISBN 185477 135 3 200 x 127 mm 394 pages |
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH The Prelude In its redefinition of epic The Prelude challenges (and takes its place alongside) Paradise Lost, as Milton had challenged Virgil, and Virgil, Homer. In place of Milton’s Christian panoply, Wordsworth offers a study of individual human consciousness. Recording ‘the progress of our being’, Milton starts with the Garden of Eden, Wordsworth with an infant at the breast. Despite his reputation for egotism, Wordsworth withheld publication of his autobiography on the grounds that it was ‘a thing unprecedented that a man should talk so much about himself’. Coleridge was impressed by The Prelude in manuscript, De Quincey inspired, but the public did not see this revolutionary poem until July 1850, three months after the poet’s death. Ironically the text revealed to Wordsworth’s Victorian first readers is now itself almost lost to sight. In their parallel-text editions, modern scholars place opposite the manuscript version of 1805 not the first edition but a composite intended to reconstruct Wordsworth’s final intentions. Republication of the 1850 text in its original form will allow readers to see the poem as the nineteenth century saw it. It will also show in what ways our understanding of it has been changed by the scholarship of the last eighty years. £42 $75 |
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