The Prelude
Begun in Germany in 1798 as a few hundred lines addressed to Coleridge and revised for the rest of his life, it carries a boy through Cumberland — skating at night, snaring woodcocks, rowing out in a stolen boat until a cliff seems to stride after him — into Cambridge, London, the Alps and revolutionary France, where he falls in with a republican officer at Blois and reaches Paris weeks after the September massacres. The account is ordered not by chronology but by what its author called spots of time, isolated scenes that keep a renovating virtue for decades after the event. Withheld from print until three months after his death, it is the first long work in English to take the growth of one mind as its entire subject.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ Paradise Lost
Attributes
Closest analogues
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