The Changing Voice of William Wordsworth

Paper Summary:

We are so accustomed to thinking of William Wordsworth as the quintessential Romantic poet -- a man in love with the idea of a simple life lived close to nature -- that we are apt to overlook the fact that he is in fact sometimes somewhat ambivalent about his relationship to nature. The paper shows that Wordsworth's vision of his relationship to the world beyond his own experiences is throughout his life a shaping element of his poetic voice and, as this vision changes so does his style. This paper focuses on "Excursion", a relatively early poem, and "The Prelude", which is a twice-expanded version of a poem of the same name that he wrote in 1799. In 1805 he would expand "Prelude" to an epic-length 13 books and in 1850 he would expand it again to 14 books. The paper shows that in both these poems, we see a different stage of Wordsworth's relationship to both self and nature.

From the Paper:

""The Prelude" is, of course, in some measure autobiographical, but it is intended to be read more as a confessional than a restatement of the facts of his life in any simple way. Indeed, although the facts described in the poem did occur in his life, in the poem he has reordered them, recast them -- offered them to us in an interpretive framework that he has created for himself to understand the arc of his life. He is providing an instruction through example of the ways in which a person can rewrite his own history without being false to it; his is not an act of deception but of synthesis, an alchemical process that burns away everything that is unnecessary and leaves only the gold from the different eras of his life.

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