ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that, without the “dramatic” guard, when “meditating in the Author’s own person” (the poet’s own formula, introduced in the Preface to The Excursion), Wordsworth did not have the confidence to elaborate upon the subject of religion. I draw attention to “the Author’s voice,” specifically, to how uncertain of this voice, his own voice, the poet seems to have been when handling religious discourse, by examining the methodology of the revision of his major autobiographical poem. The religious orientation of The Prelude is the only aspect of his work that Wordsworth revised with determination and consistency. The conversion of the text from the pantheism of 1805 to Christianity is the only type of textual alteration he introduced systematically and methodically. Yet, a comparison of the version published in 1850 with the “original” 1805 Prelude leads to the conclusion that Wordsworth endeavoured to “Christianize” his autobiography solely by alluding to Christianity. All his revisions can be classed into three categories of minute textual adjustments, which I call substitutions, additions, and elaborations. The altered autobiography does not include one single sustained statement of Wordsworth’s own altered views. Several decades of the revisionary effort did not incite the Author, when speaking “in his own person,” to write one new unrestrained passage devoted to his new creed. The most sustained of those religious insertions composed for the “Christianized” Prelude takes six lines: the size of a sonnet sestet.
