The Prelude: ‘The wavering balance of my mind’

Abstract

One of the many intriguing aspects of recent work on Romantic writers is the battle waged over Wordsworth, in terms of the claims we might want to make for him, but also in terms of the claims he might have wanted to make for himself. As Stephen Gill has demonstrated in his Life (1989), when the Lyrical Ballads first appeared in 1798, Wordsworth’s name was not the one to conjure with, alongside that of Coleridge and Southey; the anonymity of the first edition was sufficiently appropriate.1 By the time Hazlitt came to attempt to comprehend the last quarter of a century, in The Spirit of the Age (1825), Wordsworth, for him, represented the ‘pure emanation’ of that spirit; but that is not necessarily an unqualified compliment from a man reluctant to view any of his contemporaries without qualification. 2 It is true that by the time of his death in 1850 Wordsworth had been Poet Laureate for seven years, and that he had left, for publication, the poem charting the growth of his own mind – the poem we all know him by, but which was, for most of his generation, nothing more than a promise whispered in the hushed cloisters of the Prospectus to the Excursion of 1814. The Wordsworth admired by the Victorians was very different from the figure we have tried to get to know.3