Recognition and Recovery of the Mind in Wordsworths The Prelude: A Growth Narrative in Nature and History

Abstract

As the subtitle suggests, William Wordsworths The Prelude traces the growth of the poets mind. This self-writing, however, does not portray a steady, linear growth from infancy to manhood, but rather repeats a similar pattern of frustration and recovery in both nature and society. This essay aims to argue that the alienations of the self from the external world underlie the parallels in nature and history, and Wordsworth resolves these breaks by channeling his disillusionment into poetic forms. First, I will start with identifying the patterns of alienation and recovery in nature and in history, following Geoffrey H. Hartmans reading that finds the cause of the alienation in the implicit presence of the minds powers in the external world. The speaker eventually reaches the resolution to his growth narrative by acknowledging the imaginative powers of the mind. The first section raises the question of what about this essential spirit unsettles the speaker so. The second section will examine the loss of the coexistence of form and content as the speaker outgrows the prelinguistic stage, and how the imagination plays a critical role in reconstructing this lost state in the poets mind through the poetic device of spots of time. The third section aims to shed light on the significance of Coleridge the listener as another important poetic form, especially how the speakers call to Coleridge at various points in the poem works like a call to the particular self that the poem is trying to incorporate. Coleridges continued presence in the nature and the revolution narratives stabilizes the process of self-writing and fills in the psychological gaps that emerge throughout the poem. Thus, Wordsworths resolution to his psychological drama does not in fact end at a psychological level. Seeking beyond a self-absorbed mental resolution, Wordsworth reaches a poetic resolution in which the psychological breaks between the self and the external world resolve themselves into poetic forms.