This is not to suggest that Wordsworth was unfamiliar with either grief or difficulty, but rather that he could accommodate such troubles in his view of life, which seems never to have quite lost its lustre. Wordsworth led an unheroic life, made remarkable by intensity of observation rather than incident. Almost completely absent are the crashing cadences of narrative poems like the Aeneid and Paradise Lost, and there is nothing to match the terrible and multifarious griefs endured by so many characters in Dante’s Inferno. The tone of the Prelude is gentle and reflective.
Despite Wordsworth’s occasional graceful genuflection to Providence, the poem has a secularity which would have been anathema to a writer like Dante, ensconced in the theocratic fastness of the Middle Ages. Wordsworth is really no wiser at the end of his journey than he was at the start, but appears more accepting of the inexorable and sometimes bewildering fluctuations in the flow of human life. In The Prelude, on the other hand, illumination appears as the background on which the story is inscribed. However, Dante starts his journey at the age of 35, and, through a lengthy rite of passage, involving both moral and intellectual purification, arrives at a state of illumination that he is not really able to describe. In this respect the only predecessor to which it can be compared in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is similarly a journey from personal confusion to certitude, from ignorance to realization. The Prelude is the first major narrative poem in European literature which deals solely with the spiritual journey of the author.
The final version, which is the subject of this recording, was published posthumously in 1850, by Wordworth’s widow, Mary. Wordsworth published the first version of the poem in 1798, but continued to work on it for the rest of his life. Download cover art Download CD case insert The PreludeĪmong monuments of narrative poetry, The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind, by William Wordsworth, occupies a unique place.
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