ABSTRACT
My subject isn’t The Prelude, but rather its absence: the half-century in which Wordsworth’s spiritual autobiography was kept private, if not exactly secret. For Wordsworth’s biographers, his self-silencing remains “one of the most puzzling phenomena … of literary history,” though there’s no shortage of explanations (Gill 230). Perhaps The Prelude was a welcome, lifelong distraction from the enduring failure of The Recluse; belated publication in 1850 was certainly meant as a bequest in verse to the surviving family, an end–run around unsympathetic copyright laws. But if the reasons behind the delay may have been quietly domestic, they quickly took on an outsized, heroic significance. Both The Prelude and its suppression were made “phenomena of literary history” from the very beginning, when Wordsworth rationalized his decision not to publish the poem, conceding to Sir George Beaumont in 1805 that it was “a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself” (Early Years 586). There may well be self-deprecating irony in this ritualistically conventional invocation of things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme; after all, the similar claim opening Rousseau’s Confessions is, as Eugene Stelzig has argued, at once “the most inaccurate,” and the most typical, “statement about the genre on record” (1). Loyal editors such as Ernest de Selincourt, however, haven’t heard much droll qualification in Wordsworth’s excuse; instead, it’s been expanded it into a full-throated apologia for the poet’s admirable diffidence: the “high hopes in the poetic future that lay before him, and the spiritual history on which those hopes were founded … could not, without arrogance, be proclaimed to the world before he had given some solid earnest of their fulfillment” (de Selincourt, Prelude xvi).
