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Wordsworth

I'm reading Bate's biography of Wordsworth, and he recommended The Prelude, by saying it was his greatest work. I started reading it today. Thick old library book from 1959.


"Trances of thought and mountings of the mind

Come fast upon me: it is shaken off

That burden of my own unnatural self"


I guess American Transcendentalists were influenced by Romantic poets. I'm not taking the heavy The Prelude camping to read but I want to. It's a 1959 book that is not mine, so I won't risk taking it. 

Reads like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I guess Wordsworth wrote Prelude first 1799, to Leaves of Grass in 1855.

Wikipedia: According to Monique R. Morgan's "Narrative Means to Lyric Ends in Wordsworth's Prelude," "Much of the poem consists of Wordsworth's interactions with nature that 'assure[d] him of his poetic mission.' The goal of the poem is to demonstrate his fitness to produce great poetry, and The Prelude itself becomes evidence of that fitness." It traces the growth of the poet's mind by stressing the mutual consciousness and spiritual communion between the world of nature and man.

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