The Prelude:Selected Bibliography
Book I:
Mary Jacobus, "Apostrophe and Lyric Voice in The Prelude" in Hosek and Parker eds., Lyric Poetry (1985)
James Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature (1984), 183-198.
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (posthum. 1976), 167ff.
A. "The glad preamble"
James Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature (1984), 195-198
M. H. Abrams, "The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor" (orig. 1957; rptd. in his book of the same title, (1984).
B. "Was it for this . . . ?"
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (orig. 1961), 143-147
C. Stealing the "little boat"
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (orig. 1961), 147-150.
Timothy Bahti, "Wordsworth's Rhetorical Theft," in Arden Reed, ed., Romanticism and Language (1984)
Catherine Belsey, "The Romantic Construction of the Unconscious," in Francis Barker, ed., 1789: Reading Writing Revolution (1982), 75.
Jonathan Arac, "The Prelude and Critical Revision," in Machin and Norris, eds., Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry (1987), 230-232.
See Also ALL
Book II:
A. "Blest the infant Babe"
Paul de Man, "Wordsworth and the Victorians," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984), 89-92.
B. "If this be error"
Book IV:
A. The discharged soldier
Don Bialostosky, Making Tales (1984), 160-184.
See Also ALL
The Book of Books (Book V):
Cynthia Chase, "The Accidents of Disfiguration," in Decomposing Figures (1986)
James Chandler, WW's Second Nature (1984), 107-119.
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (1976), 175-195
A. The dream of the Arab
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (orig. 1961), 150-151
J. Hillis Miller, The Linguistic Moment (1985), 87-105.
Michael Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism (1989), 44-46.
B. The Boy of Winander
Tilottama Rajan, "Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness" in Hosek and Parker, eds., Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (1985), pp. 198-200.
Geoffrey Hartman, WW's Poetry 1787-1814 (1964), 18-22.
C. The Drowned Man
Andrzej Warminski, "Facing Language: WW's First Poetic Spirits," in Karen Hanson, ed., Romantic Revolutions (1990), 38ff.
Cathy Caruth, "Past Recognition: Narrative Origins in Wordsworth and Freud," Modern Language Notes, 100:5 (December 1985).
See Also ALL
Book VI:
Simplon Pass
Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision (1954), 129-132, and Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (1964), 16-17, 42-48, 328-338.
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (1961, 1971) 152-155
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (posthum. 1976), 195-204.
Jerome McGann, Romantic Ideology (1983), 25-26, 114
Marlon B. Ross, "Romantic Quest and Conquest: Troping Masculine Power in the Crisis of the Romantic Calling," first in Anne Mellor, ed., Romanticism and Feminism (1988), then in his own The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women's Poetry (1989), section 3.
Summary of selected secondary texts:
- M. H. Abrams, "Wordsworth's `Prelude' and Crisis-Autobiography" (Natural Supernaturalism):
In crisis-autobiography, "an individual confronts a natural scene and makes it abide his question, and the interchange between his mind and nature constitutes the entire poem, which usually poses and resolves a spiritual crisis" (92). This "theodicy of the private life . . . . translates the painful process of Christian conversion and redemption into a painful process of self-formation, crisis, and self-recognition, which culminates in a stage of self-coherence, self-awareness, and assured power that is its own reward" (96).
In the Simplon Pass episode, WW apostrophizes Imagination, then sees all the sights around him as "Characters of the great Apocalypse, / The types and symbols of Eternity, / Of first and last, and midst, and without end (1805, VI, 570-572): "In consonance with Wordsworth's two-term frame of reference, the Scriptural Apocalypse is assimilated to an apocalypse of nature; its written characters are natural objects, which are read as types and symbols of permanence and change; and its antithetic qualities of sublimity and beauty are seen as simultaneous expressions on the face of heaven and earth, declaring an unrealized truth which the chiaroscuro of the scene articulates for the prepared mind . . ." (107).
Abrams thus sees Imagination as a kind of solder which welds together the mind and nature (or God, mind, and nature) in order to render natural objects immediately meaningful "for the prepared mind."
- Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814:
Geoffrey Hartman has a very different view of Imagination than Abrams does. Hartman sees Wordsworthian Imagination as a shock which immobilizes the poet. Later when WW is recollecting his thoughts and feelings in tranquility (when he is writing), "Wordsworth does break through to resolve partially the stasis" by turning attention away from the "halted traveler" (the previous self he describes) and onto the poetic consciousness: thus, after questioning the peasant about Simplon Pass, "And all the answers which the man returned / . . . . / Ended in this -- that we had crossed the Alps," after being halted by the knowledge that they had already accomplished the task without noticing it, WW "partially resolves the stasis" by turning his attention to poetic imagination, to his consciousness now as he writes: "Imagination!--here the Power so called / . . . / That awful Power . . . / Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, / At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost / Halted without a struggle to break through, / But to my conscious soul I now can say-- / `I recognise thy glory.'"
"It is a strange name to give it. Imagination, we are usually told, vitalizes and animates. Especially the Romantic Imagination. Yet here it stands closer to death than life, at least in its immediate effect. The poet is isolated and immobilized by it; it obscures rather than reveals nature; the light of the senses goes out. Only in its secondary action does it vitalize and animate, and event hn not nature but a soul that realizes its individual greatness, a greatness independent of sense and circumstance" (WW's Poetry, 17).
- Geoffrey Hartman, "The Romance of Nature and the Negative Way," in Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness:
Reading the "Characters of the great Apocalypse" passage: "Nature is again surpassed, for the poet's imagination is called forth, at the time of writing, by the barely scrutable, not by the splendid emotion; by the disappointment, not by the fulfillment" (291-292). "The original disappointment is seen not as a test, or as aprelude to magnificence, but as a revelation in itself. It suddenly reveals a power--imagination--that could not be satisfied by anything in nature, however sublime. The song's progress comes to a halt because the poet is led beyond nature" (293).
See Also ALL
Book VII:
A. "Genius of Burke! forgive the pen"
James Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature (1984), 26-42.
B. The Blind Beggar
Cynthia Chase, "The Ring of Gyges and the Coat of Darkness: Reading Rousseau with Wordsworth," in Arden Reed, ed., Romanticism & Language (1984); rptd. in her book, Decomposing Figures
Geoffrey Hartman, "The Unremarkable Wordsworth," in Marshall Blonsky, ed., On Signs, pp. 331-333.
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company, 155
C. Bartholomew Fair
Neil Hertz, "The Notion of Blockage in Literature of the Sublime," first in ed. Geoffrey Hartman, Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text (1978), rptd. in Hertz's own book, The End of the Line (1985).
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973), 149-152.
See Also ALL
Book VIII:
The Rustic Fair
See Also ALL
Books IX-X (1805) / IX-XI (1850):
The Revolution Books (also called The France Books)
Mary Jacobus, "`That Great Stage Where Senators Perform': Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theatre," SiR, 22 (Fall 1983), 353-387.
Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1983), Ch. 8 "WW's Prelude," 248-275
James Chandler, WW's Second Nature (1984), 42-61; 199-206.
Kenneth Johnston, Wordsworth and the Recluse, esp. 173-194.
Nicholas Roe,
A. the Vaudracour and Julia episode
(1805 Prelude only)
The Vaudracour and Julia romance replaces WW's account of his affair with Annette Vallon, had he been faithfully recounting his history. Critics wonder about the relation between romance and autobiography, and romance and revolution.
Mary Jacobus, "The Law of/and Gender: Genre Theory and The Prelude," Diacritics (Winter 1984)
Alan Liu, "`Shapeless Eagerness': The Genre of Revolution in Books 9-10 of The Prelude," MLQ 43 (1982), 9-13 [on res]
Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution, 265-269.
Gayatri Spivak, "Sex and History in The Prelude (1805): Books Nine to Thirteen," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23 (1981); also reprinted in Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry
David Erdman, "Wordsworth as Heartsworth; or, Was Regicide the Prophetic Ground of those `Moral Questions,'" in The Evidence of the Imagination, ed. Donald Reiman, 1978.
B. "the crisis of that strong disease"
James Chandler, WW's Second Nature (1984), 55-58.
Jerome McGann, Romantic Ideology, 90-92.
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (1961, 1971) 157-159
See Also ALL
Book XI (1805) or XII (1850):
"Spots of Time"
James Chandler, WW's Second Nature (1984), 206-215.
Catherine Belsey, "The Romantic Construction of the Unconscious," in Barker, ed., 1789: Reading Writing Revolution, p. 76.
Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1983), Ch. 8 "WW's Prelude," esp. pp. 264-265.
Theresa Kelley, "The Economics of the Heart: WW's Sublime and Beautiful," Romanticism Past and Present, 5 (1981), 15-32.
Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company, 159-162.
Last Book (XIII in 1805; XIV in 1850):
Mount Snowdon
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (1976), 194.
Jonathan Arac, "The Prelude and Critical Revision," in Norris, Post-Structuralist Readings, 236-238.
Harold Bloom, Visionary Company, 162-164.
Conclusion
Marlon B. Ross, "Romantic Quest and Conquest," section 3.
See Also ALL
ALL
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971)--index lists by passage.
Alan Liu, Wordsworth: the Sense of History (1989); index lists by passage, using these titles (and others).
----, "Wordsworth and Subversion, 1793-1804: Trying Cultural Criticism," The Yale Journal of Criticism 2:2 (Spring 1989) [on res]
Harold Bloom, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations of the Prelude (1986).
Mary Jacobus, Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference: Essays on the Prelude (1989).