Myself and Some Other Being: Wordsworth and the Life Writing

Prelude

1 1 Prelude We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.1 N earing the completion of the thirteen-­ book draft of his autobiographical poem The Prelude , William Wordsworth wrote to his friend Sir George Beaumont in 1805 that it is “a thing unprecedented in Literary history that a man should talk so much about himself.” He adds that doing so “is not self-­ conceit . . . but real humility,” having begun the poem “because I was unprepared to treat any more arduous subject and diffident of my own powers.”2 Having settled on nearly 8500 lines of iambic pentameter for the story of his life, Wordsworth thought he had finished the project he began in the fall of 1798.The poem, however, would remain unread by anyoneother than a handful of Wordsworth’s closest friends and family for close to half a century. Wordsworth would edit, rewrite, delete, add, and otherwise tinker with those lines during most of that time. Over the decades of revision the poem’s original chronology , a span that focuses onWordsworth’s earliest memories and most formative experiences leading up to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, his collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is maintained. These years are the “determined bounds”of hispoem,andthosedemarcationsneverchange.3 Living until the ageof 80,Wordsworth had many moreyears to add to the poem about his life, but he never did. The Prelude , then, is the prelude to a career, a writing life that begins with Lyrical Ballads. In The Prelude, which he would describe as the “historyofa poet’s mind,” Wordsworth finds that the source of his creativity is in what already has happened and discovers that the instrument of his creativity is writing, talking “so much,” about himself. 2 Prelude The Prelude; or Growth ofa Poet’s Mind, an Autobiographical Poem is the full title given to the poem by Wordsworth’s executors for publication in 1850, just a few weeks after the poet’s death. Not a conventional autobiography by any means, The Prelude is life writing of a peculiar kind—epic memoir in blank verse.4 In this letter to Beaumont, Wordsworth admits the uncomfortable self-­ consciousness of drawing upon personal experience—and the vanity of not only drawing upon personal experience but also treating it as though it were a proper subject for poetry. The poet’s remark also signals another concern—the desire to see one’s writing as contributing in some significant way to “literature ,” as staking a claim for oneself in “literary history.” The Prelude, then, is about finding one’s place among other writers, the living and thedead. But that after-­life is reserved for the writer, not the real person. Ironically, Wordsworth presumed that literary immortality would come as the result of other work, not The Prelude. He had to write those 8500 lines because he had to first exist before he could live forever. Wordsworth writes The Prelude to write that self into existence. This person, the life writing (that is, the living person doing the writing), William Wordsworth, writes his life in the hope of finding words worthy of writing himself as a writer, as Wordsworth. Those two words, “words” and “worth,” are essential, in more ways than one, to Wordsworth ’s identity. After all, this was a precocious teenager who signed his first published poem with the pseudonym Axiologus—a transliterated pun in Greek that means “the worth of words,” or “words’ worth.” The Wordsworth who is the subject of Myself and Some Other Being is just a few years older, in his late 20s and early 30s. He believes he is destined to be a writer but has to figure out what kind of writer he is supposed to be. More important, he must convince himself that what he has to say is necessary. So, he writes about his life in order to jus- 3 Prelude tify his writing life—chiefly to himself. The heart of this book focuses on writing Wordsworth did in Germany, during a miserable winter that made him appreciate memories of home and that made him re-­ envision himself in relation to those memories. Soon after finishing Lyrical Ballads, he began writing the fragments that would becomeThe Prelude as well as other poems that are significant to the subject of memory and life-­ writing. This book is roughly chronological , following Wordsworth from when he begins...