ABSTRACT
Many Romantic poems thrive on the paradoxes laid bare by de Man and Cynthia Chase, and build into their imagined universes alertness to the 'ceaseless and reactive interplay' between the life and the work. Biography is to the individual what history is to nations, and just as Romantic poetry often challenges the primacy of history, so it often mystifies biography. For the poem brings into play, as many Romantic poems do, the concept of a best or ideal self that challenges the self constructed by the biographer poring over dates and documents. Romantic poems that recast the past into a shape - whether it is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's determination to trace a pattern of failure or William Wordsworth's insistence on discovering a quasi-providential rightness in the passage from past to present - present the biographer with a severe challenge. The Prelude, of all Romantic works, is at once the most responsive and resistant to biography.
