William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

The unfoldment of the Self through the City is one of isolation and alienation, a gradual displacement of a spiritual unity into a materialistic space, the gridlock of the city and its world-feeling. So it is no wonder that, in history, when things are beginning to vanish, they blossom and explode into its largest cultural expression, a sunset effect of consciousness. When knights, with dull chainmail and little aesthetic form are dying out is precisely right when the knights in shining armor with their plethora of angular aesthetic and a sculpted, glossy and 'noble' knighthood visage. So, too, when nature begins to become exploited and is becoming lost, the stories of Grimm and fairy tales, gingerbread men and worlds of fantasia come back to grasp what was lost. So, when nature is invaded by trains and machines, the Poet clings tightest to nature and must return to the trees in an artistic solipsism and a celebration of the Artist / Poet with capital letters as an identity as such.

What the Prelude metahistorically signifies is the birth of a new consciousness into a modern world — of knocking back on the womb of nature — and using language as a means to return to it (by seeing the trees and rivers speaking to him) though language is the means by which the Poet becomes conscious of his own alienation — yet ironically Language is the force of his alienation — for were he not trapped in linguistic, serial time he would be in the cosmic sentience of the babe. Thereby, he hears language in nature itself (in close relation to Kabbalah, and the knowledge of the true name of things).

The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
Thence did I drink the visionary power;

And so the constant need to instantiate the poem into the land, the object of the world, itself. Either by implanting the poem into a location and giving it a localized sense of being, or by literally carving the poem into the rock, the clinging becomes tighter. Wordsworth, losing both parents by age 13, representing Oedipal undertones through this loss of the connectivity with nature, the orphan lost in the world, and so lacking the real parent is resolved unconsciously through the archetypal Parent of Father Sky and Mother Earth. At one moment, stealing a bird away from a snare that someone else has caught, runs away and hears low breathing of himself being caught by the neighbors and townsmen but on a higher turn on the spiral: that Bird is the symbol of the Self and he is stealing himself away from nature and the breathing and rumbling heard is of Nature itself for the process of individuation is the crime of individuation.

Others will love, and we may teach them how —
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things.

All during the poem, Wordsworth struggles to put consciousness back in nature and attempts to reachieve Nature — but after his experiences of the celebration of the Artist (with capital A) and the artistic unity of being to heal the wound is reached — he reaches the integration of his consciousness equal to nature. Many miss these concluding lines, marking him as a mere simple animist who is trying to get back into nature but what the poem is really about is psychology and consciousness and a phenomenology of the Self in almost Hegelian terms.… (més)

A message from Wordsworth to today's idiots: "The human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants....". That was my first impression of Wordsworth's perspicacity. The second was his apparent sadness about the human condition, the third was his belief in and love of nature, and fourth was his gift for storytelling. I now appreciate him much more than I did fresh out of school. His "Lines Written in Early Spring" finishes with these three lines:
If such be Nature's holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
I guess human history never really changes. At the end of this collection, Mr. Somervell has included his take on the "Principles of Poetry and 'Lyrical Ballads' ", a very worthwhile inclusion. If, for some reason I have to divest myself of much of my collection of The Kings Treasuries of Literature, I will want to save this one: Number 40.… (més)

This comment is on the 1850 version of The Prelude, not others or Norton's criticism/apparatus. Perhaps a slog to some contemporary readers, but brilliant, beautiful and often sublime and deeply insightful. That’s not to say it's completely without contradiction or that it presents a coherent system of thought (or is consistently brilliant and beautiful). But it’s rich in food for thought, sometimes viewed from very unusual perspectives, and in an uncannily earthy yet simultaneously other-worldly way. And the language is, to me at least, some of the most engaging in English.… (més)