ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I argued that Wordsworth constructed his poetic identity and relationship with readers on a professional model, as part of a larger strategy of self-authorization. In this chapter, I will explore how his self-representation developed in his poetry in relation to this same model, eventually producing a specifically authorial self that he (and subsequent readers) generalized into a universal model of self. Beginning with the poetry of Lyrical Ballads and the Ruined Cottage and Pedlar manuscripts, Wordsworth first experimented with poetic identity through various characters in displaced forms; then claimed such identity directly for himself in the Prelude, “Resolution and Independence,” and other poems of direct self-representation. In the process, I will argue, Wordsworth's poetic identity and subjectivity emerged as a kind of side effect of his need to authorize himself in his chosen vocation as Poet. After he established his sense of his own identity through the Prelude manuscript, Wordsworth could then return to his main poetic project; and although he never completed the Recluse, he would write most of his poetry after the 1807 Poems in a public voice, about subjects other than the deep personal self. Seen in this way, Wordsworth's self-representation is inseparable from the cultural and material conditions of his authorship, and above all his need for vocational self-authorization.
