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BEYOND "THE PRELUDE": A STUDY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF WORDSWORTH'S CONSERVATISM, 1793-1820
Abstract
For most of this century, the perception of "two Wordsworths" traceable to the criticism of the poet's contemporaries has artificially restricted the study of Wordsworth to the early works written or published before 1808. The sharp distinction between the "two Wordsworths" has identified the loquacious style and liberal political and social outlook of the early poems with the "characteristically Wordsworthian" and made The Prelude the critical and biographical measure of all things Wordsworthian. With the early text of The Prelude as the culminating work of Wordsworth's imagination, it has been possible to dismiss the later productions with their complex, often didactic, style and conservative political and social attitudes as uncharacteristic and use the late text of The Prelude to stand for all of his work produced after 1808. By examining the development of Wordsworth's conservatism between 1793 and 1820, this study constructs a bridge between the "two Wordsworths" and the two Preludes. The relationship between his essentially liberal "ways of seeing" which remained constant throughout his life and his essentially conservative "habits of mind" which began to assert themselves during the Napoleonic wars and came to direct the "ways of seeing after 1820, suggests that the operation of Wordsworth's unified imagination or "Reason in its most exalted mood," continued with only two significant interruptions throughout his life. Through a series of tours in the 1830's, Wordsworth recovered from the second crisis in his mental history produced by personal sorrows and the public debates on Catholic Emancipation and reform in the years 1828-32. The "tranquil restoration" these tours provided makes many of the poems written after 1832 as "characteristically Wordsworthian" as any of his productions before 1808. Instead of "two Wordsworths," these later poems, in conjunction with the late text of The Prelude, suggest that Wordsworth's career was characterized by continuous development and change temporarily interrupted by two hiatuses during which his expression occurred mainly in prose. An understanding of Wordsworth's conservatism makes possible an expansion of the canon to include some of the later works along with the early and reveals that instead of "two Wordsworths," the later productions present one Wordsworth commenting upon the other using the same retrospective technique which characterizes The Prelude.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
CREES, RICHARD FRANK, "BEYOND "THE PRELUDE": A STUDY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF WORDSWORTH'S CONSERVATISM, 1793-1820" (1980). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8018676.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8018676