“My Office Upon Earth”: William Wordsworth, Professionalism, and Poetic Identity

Unlike any of the previous poets in this study, William Wordsworth constructed his poetic identity through the model of vocation or profession. In the Prelude, he represents himself after his involvement with the French Revolution as rediscovering his “true self” specifically as “a Poet,” finding “beneath that name/My office upon earth, and nowhere else” (10.915, 919–20). ¹ Here as in other writings, Wordsworth presents the identity of “Poet” as if it is an established professional category. In fact, though, Wordsworth had to construct this category of the “Poet” himself, in what was fundamentally a project of professional self-authorization. As the 1790s progressed, Wordsworth faced the eighteenth-century isolation and alienation of the poet in a particularly aggravated form. Retiring first to southwest England and then to the Lake District, far from the centers of literary culture, he embarked on his poetic career without recognized cultural or political authority, in the wake of political disappointment and the dispersal and active oppression of the republican community with which he had identified himself. Wordsworth's intense turn to poetic self-representation, I will argue, responded directly to this situation, as he compensated for his isolation and lack of a recognized social position by attempting to construct his own vocational identity and authority as a poet in relation to an unknown print market public. In the process, I will argue, Wordsworth justified his authorship by constructing a specifically professional model of the poetic self.