The Prelude
William Wordsworth(1850)
Extract
The Child is father of the Man.
A boy skates across a frozen lake at evening, and the cliffs wheel around him as he stops, and the earth itself seems to move with a motion not its own. William Wordsworth spent decades composing this epic autobiography of the imagination, publishing it posthumously in 1850, yet its greatest passages retain the shock of first encounter, a mind discovering what it means to be alive in a body in a landscape. The poem traces a poet's consciousness from infancy through Cambridge to the French Revolution and back to Cumberland, arguing that ordinary moments of childhood, stealing eggs, rowing on a moonlit lake, are the foundations of all later wisdom. It is the great poem of becoming, of the self shaped by what it has been stunned to see.
If you loved this
Tennyson writes the same autobiography-in-verse, but grief replaces joy as the engine and the Lake District becomes a graveyard.
Lowell reinvents the confessional long poem Wordsworth created, but the childhood is darker and the parents are closer.
Thoreau writes the same spiritual autobiography of a man alone in nature, but in American prose instead of English blank verse.