ABSTRACT
The poem's full title locates it specifically, as do the titles of many eighteenth-century poems describing a landscape. The poem is lyrical in that many of its most memorable sections concentrate on the actions and feelings of an individual at a unique or typical moment. The Prelude is a central text of British Romanticism. Broadly, lyrics are poems written in the first person, which represent a feeling; narratives may be written in the first or third person and tell a story. William Wordsworth has a reputation as a 'nature poet'. In The Prelude, memories of childhood would represent a lost Eden. Paradise Lost is a poem that attempts to understand the loss of Eden and offer consolation. In an essay on William Shakespeare's Coriolanus William Hazlitt wrote that 'the language of poetry naturally falls in with the language of power'. The whole of The Prelude has been 'a story destined for thy ear'.
