Of course, we do not witness the entire spectrum in The Prelude. In maturity, it was the high Anglican Church tradition to which he turned, for a personal faith and as a source for many of his later poetical ideas. Artistically and religiously, he found youthful inspiration in the hills and vales of the Lake District he responded to them with his simple ballads and a joyous mysticism.
Politically, the fierce independence of character the poet admired in the yeoman of the North Country came to be symbolized by the French patriot later he felt that conservative British institutions were the bulwark of true freedom. In his lifetime, his mental outlook swung from youthful radicalism to ultraconservatism. It is doubtful that he would have created an inimitable philosophy of nature had he been reared in London's slums. Just as Wordsworth never got far or was long from his native regions physically, so they continued to color his emotional reactions throughout his life. The influence of the English character may be traced in many of the ideas behind the poem. Most of the imagery, as well as the diction, reflects the natural environment, especially the English countryside, and manages to capture much of the wildness and beauty of that terrain. Much of this repetition may be due to the poet's episodic efforts to show his shifting point of view in connection with certain basic ideas. Wordsworth will describe an intellectual experience again and again with only minor variations. Only a mere fraction of the whole poem may be said to be great, but it is this fraction that has continued to secure it a place high in English literature.Īnother drawback of the verse is its blatant repetition. The unwavering strength and unity of purpose which underlie it also help it to soar.
Frequently verbose, diffuse, and bathetic, the verse is carried by those rare moments when it flashes fire or reaches a resounding note of rich poetic song. At times, particularly in the latter half of the work, the narrative dries up altogether, and the reader must pick his way through a welter of disconnected disquisitions. Unfortunately, this results in a certain definite unevenness in the development of the narrative. The general procedure in The Prelude is to record an experience from the poet's past and then to examine its philosophical and psychological significance and relate it to nature and society at large. To this type, Wordsworth, with his unconventional ideas of diction, brought a natural and conversational tone. The resulting form came to be called the "literary" epic as opposed to heroic and folk epics. A revival of interest in Milton led to the establishment of Miltonic blank verse as the standard medium for lengthy philosophical or didactic poetical works. In the middle of the eighteenth century, there was an eclipse of interest in the rhymed heroic couplet. The poem is written in blank verse, unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter with certain permissible substitutions of trochees and anapests to relieve the monotony of the iambic foot and with total disregard for the stanza form. The Prelude takes its unity from the fact that the central "hero" is its author. The epic is customarily defined as a long narrative poem which recounts heroic actions, commonly legendary or historical, and usually of one principal hero (from whence it derives its unity). The Prelude may be classed somewhat loosely as an epic it does not satisfy all the traditional qualifications of that genre. Its comparison with the great seventeenth-century epic is in some respects a happy one since Milton was (after Coleridge) Wordsworth's greatest idol. " The Prelude is the greatest long poem in our language after Paradise Lost," says one critic.
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