Critical Responses

Abstract

The long-delayed publication of The Prelude means that there is little contemporary critical evaluation. In an 1804 letter to Sir George Beaumont, Wordsworth defines the subject of the poem as ‘the growth of my own mind taken up on a large scale’ and reveals his uneasiness about its length, wondering if it ought to be ‘lopped’. Yet the next sentence recognises that abbreviation is impossible: cut out odd bits of his interlaced reflections and memories and The Prelude would no longer make sense. Neither Coleridge nor de Quincey shared his fears about length. When Wordsworth read the 1805 version to Coleridge, he immediately gave vent to his admiration in a moving 120-line poem. To him it was the absolute warranty of Wordsworth’s poetic greatness: ‘Of Truth profound a sweet continuous song’, he says. Coleridge accurately observes the nerve centres of the poem, the effect upon the growing boy of the delights and terrors of his early environment and upon the young man of those tempestuous years when ‘France in all her towns lay vibrating’. De Quincey’s reaction was equally appreciative, especially of the poem’s visionary nature, and his frequent enthusiastic references meant that the existence of this poem ‘of high pretensions and extraordinary magnitude’ became widely known.