ABSTRACT
Wordsworth’s return to the eighteenth century (discussed in chapter Four) coincides with his return to the nineteenth. (Re)integrating the stabilities and fixities of the Enlightenment helped the poet regain the self-assurance to cope with the challenges of Romanticism. This duality is displayed most powerfully in the split between Wordsworth’s approach to the imagination in his “minor Pieces” composed after 1805 and, on the other side of the divide, the revisions which were (not) introduced into the post-1805 Prelude. Wordsworth never effectively revised the poem’s claims concerning the imagination. As a result, these original bold claims for man’s “glorious faculty” clash uncontrollably with the inserted low-key passages of pious self-abasement. Additionally, the revisions ironically minimize the presence of God in the “Christianized” text. In the imaginative climax of The Prelude, the Climbing of Snowdon, the effect of these revisions is Beckettian: the “I” climbs through the mists up towards the revelation of the human condition and his own existential solitude. He is a Recluse on “the lonely mountain.” In the coda of this chapter I argue that the conversion of the autobiographical work from pantheism to Christianity might have been Wordsworth’s method of converting The Prelude (the sanctuary of the “worshipper of Nature”) to The Recluse (the “gothic church”). That is, the final stage of the history of Wordsworth’s Recluse does not end in 1815 (Kenneth Johnston’s claim) but begins in 1819 (the first overall revision of The Prelude), and terminates with this poem’s posthumous publication in 1850.
