William Wordsworth - The Prelude

“I mean to speak

Of that interminable building reared

By observation of affinities

In objects where no brotherhood exists

To common minds…”





The Prelude, published a year after Wordsworth’s death in 1850, describes his experiences of growing up as a man and a poet, beginning with an account of the poet’s childhood in the English Lake Country. 


It is in fact the first long autobiographical poem written in a drawn out and audacious process of self-exploration, perhaps the greatest long poem in modern English letters.


Wordsworth’s concern with the interconnectedness of all things constituted a radical vision at the time, the scale of it leading many to call it mysticism.


Many critics rank it as Wordsworth’s greatest work. 


WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770–1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years. He was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.