Reading, Wordsworth, "The Prelude"

In this seminar we will take the time to read one long, unfinished autobiographical poem of the early nineteenth century: William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Published posthumously, and revised across his poetic career, this poem was innovative in the way that it focussed on the development of the self in relation to its affective, natural and cultural attachments. It ranges widely over experiences of the countryside and the city, politics (including Wordsworth’s traumatic experience of the French Revolution), the nature of love and friendship, journeying, social injustice, death, memory and hope. We will focus our attention on how Wordsworth thinks through both familiar pathways and experiences of the strange and the uncanny – most of all in situations that seem ordinary and everyday,- as well as his processing of the literary tradition. Ultimately, this is a poem that repays careful close reading, as what seems obvious, even mundane about human experience comes to take on a dazzling strangeness.