ABSTRACT
The Preludeand its suppression were made 'phenomena of literary history' from the very beginning, when Wordsworth rationalized his decision not to publish the poem, conceding to Sir George Beaumont in 1805 that it was 'a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself'. The 'high romantic argument' of The Prelude, in which, as M. H. Abrams has suggested, Wordsworth cast himself as a 'philosopher-seer and poet-prophet, an elected spokesman for the Western tradition', is framed as a nexus of material and metaphysical privilege too exalted for the marketplace, a grandeur that needed five decades in which to soften. Ragged legion made this social problem into a literary problem, at least for poetry like Wordsworth's, or has come to be seen as being built, on discourses of 'Inspiration'. The ragged legion of 'inspired fellows' was not illiterate but 'illiteral', a portmanteau packing together the social vulgarity of the enthusiast and the metaphysical transcendence of 'high argument'.
