ABSTRACT
My subtitle may appear too cautious, and “intimations” may be an understatement of Wordsworth's perceived sense of unconscious thoughts and processes. Certainly there is an abundance of evidence throughout Wordsworth's work—including his coinage “underconsciousness”—that suggests the strength of his own intuitions of an unconscious realm or range of mental activity; and critics and commentators have not been behindhand in bringing Wordsworth's biography and parts of his work to psychoanalytic account. They are justified in doing so, as they are with other writers of the Romantic period, though in the instance of Wordsworth the promise has sometimes turned out to be more promising in prospect than in completed results—as if the critic had met with resistance on the part of the material that was both unanticipated and, beyond a certain quickly attained point, intractable. And that is, I believe, more or less the case, particularly when it comes to Wordsworth's intimate sense of himself and to his own autobiographical representations and understandings as these are expressed, or refracted, or insinuated in The Prelude. In his life as both man and writer Wordsworth—with the willing connivance of his family circle of hench people—was uncommonly astute in covering his tracks, and this steady, indeed sturdy, defensiveness has made an apparently welcoming document like The Prelude into rather stony ground for many, if not all, of those who seek to trace or to demonstrate the finer details of psychoanalytic vision or theory as these are mediated through the apparently exemplary Wordsworth.
