I read The Prelude in a Norton Critical Edition collection, Wordsworth's Poetry and Prose. Like all the excellent NCEs, this volume includes a selection of criticism from Wordsworth's own time to ours, or nearly–that depends on what you're willing to encompass in "our time." I was following my usual practice of avoiding talk about the work before reading the work itself. But about halfway through the poem I had to sneak a look at the few pages of Matthew Arnold's criticism included, taken from his preface to a Wordsworth edition. I did this because I had, back in my brief days as a graduate student in English, read a certain amount of Arnold and tended to agree with his critical judgments. And I was not enjoying The Prelude, nor admiring it, as much as I expected to, and wondered whether Arnold had anything to say about it, and, if he did, whether I was going to find myself in uneasy disagreement with him, or supported and pleased by his agreement.
It proved to be the latter, at least to this extent:
The Excursion and the Prelude, his poems of greatest bulk, are by no means Wordsworth's best work.
I will lay out my prejudices, negative and positive. First, as far as I can recall I hadn't read any Wordsworth since I was an undergraduate more than fifty years ago. At the time, the early Romantics were not, in general, my favorites, with the major exception of Keats. I liked Wordsworth's short lyrics, but the famous and more lengthy "Tintern Abbey" and "Intimations of Immortality" were pretty far short of knockouts. It seemed then that Wordsworth at length was not likely to be as good as Wordsworth in brief. I suppose there were some selections from The Prelude in my sophomore English textbook, and I suppose I probably read them, but I don't remember them at all.
On the other hand, I like the premise of The Prelude: a sort of autobiography in verse. In general (again) the decline of the long poem has been part of the general decline of poetry over the past century or two. By "decline" there I mean specifically the way the word "poetry" has come to mean primarily "lyric poetry"–works of from a few lines to a few pages, and a fairly brief expression of, usually, some personal feeling or insight. The verse drama and the narrative poem of scope comparable to that of the novel are no longer an important part of literary culture, though there are the occasional, and occasionally successful, instances. The Prelude interested me as an attempt to bring something like the personal sensibility of the lyric into a work of ten thousand or so lines (thirteen "books" running between 500 and 1000 lines each).
If you didn't major in English in college you may not recall (from your required English class(es)) that around 1800 Wordsworth and his friend Coleridge sought to revolutionize English poetry in reaction to what they viewed as the excessive artificiality of most poetry of the time–Pope, for instance. They criticized the elaborate diction and at least implicitly the critical, somewhat detached, somewhat rationalistic approach of that poetry. (See Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes" for a good not-too-long example.) In a sort of manifesto, the polemical preface to their joint publication Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth stated their aim
…to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men….
The "common life" they had in mind was often the truly common, the life of farmers and villagers, not aristocrats, far from wealth, fashion, and London. This produced lyrics like Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems (the first line of this one is its title):
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.
So much, then, for the state of play. To go straight to the outcome and summarize my reaction: I like the parts of The Prelude where Wordsworth sticks most closely to the ideals expressed in that preface. But there are long stretches where he departs from them, and those I often found dull, or worse.
Several months have passed since I finished reading the poem last fall. In preparation for writing this, I picked it up again and browsed. The opening lines are excellent. The verse is a clear stream, the appeal to the senses and experience direct and persuasive: Wordsworth is enjoying his return to the countryside after a sojourn in London, which he does not love, and the freedom he is about to enjoy for the pursuit of his poetic vocation. But pretty quickly a troublesome sign appears: a lengthy praise of his own creative ambition, which he elevates to a sacred calling:
…to the open fields I told
A prophecy: poetic numbers came
Spontaneously, and clothed in priestly robes
My spirit, thus singled out, as it might seem
For holy services….
I have always disliked, and now detest, the tendency, which began or at least gained prominence with the Romantics, to cast the artist, or rather The Artist, as a quasi-religious figure, set apart from ordinary people by his genius. Eric Gill is generally and justly condemned these days for his sexual abuse of his daughters. That doesn't mean that everything he said was wrong, though, and he was never more right than when he said "The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist."
And The Prelude is full of that sort of thing, and not as general observation but as part of Wordsworth's account of himself, contemplating the progress of his efforts not just to write but to fulfill a rather grandiose mission which is all bound up with his philosophy. I don't think I can describe the latter, and anyway I don't want to bother. He and Coleridge had lofty and somewhat abstract ideas about mind and imagination that I always found somewhat vaporous, and in conflict with their preference for concrete language and experience in poetry. His diction in those parts also tends, perhaps inevitably, toward the vague and the pompous. The long section, spanning two books, in which he describes his experiences in France at the beginning of the Revolution might have been a vivid story, but lapses often into abstraction and detachment: "I thought this, and I thought that," not necessarily memorably expressed.
What I find worthy of being called great in The Prelude is the recounting of experiences which are distinctly of the physical world: not mental, not ideas. The relation of those experiences is more potent than his talk about them. I'm regretting now that I didn't make notes, or mark passages in the book, because I can't readily put my finger now on one particularly vivid story of his youthful wandering in the countryside where he grew up: this one involves rowing at night, and feeling something uncanny in the way the crags which, because he is rowing away from them and thus facing toward them, seem to grow taller as his distance reveals more of them.
When I finished reading The Prelude I turned to some of the sonnets and other shorter poems that I remembered liking long ago. They are even better than I remembered, and are the solid foundation of his reputation. I doubt that I'll ever read the entirety of The Prelude again, but I'll certainly go back to those. There are many that would be new to me, and almost certainly some gems among them.
Light On Dark Water 
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