In Our Time - The Prelude

Episode Date: November 22, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the greatest long poems in the English language – The Prelude. Begun in Northern Germany during the terrible winter of 1798 by a young and dreadfully homesick William Wordsworth, The Prelude was to be his masterpiece - an epic retelling of his own life and the foundation stone of English Romanticism. In language of aching beauty wordsworth expressed thoughts about memory, identity, nature and experience familiar to anybody who has walked alone among the hills. With Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London; Stephen Gill, University Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford; Emma Mason, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Warwick.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the winter of 1798 was a terrible one across Europe, allegedly the coldest of the century. In the small town of Goslar in northern Germany,

a bitterly cold young English poet wrote some of his finest short poems and feeling dreadfully homesick, then wrote a few consolatory verses about his childhood. That was William Wordsworth, and the poem he started writing was to be his masterpiece, The Prelude, an epic retelling of Wordsworth's own life and a foundation stone of English romanticism.

With me to discuss the prelude, Rosemary Ashton, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature University College London, Stephen Gill, University of Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Lincoln College Oxford, and Emma Mason, senior lecture in English at the University of Warwick.

Rosemary Ashton, Wordsworth has 28 years old, lyrical ballads is a great collaboration with Samuel Taylor-Colary as you've just been published. Can you explain what he, Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister, were doing in this small German town? Well, they set off together, just as lyrical ballads was being published in Bristol.

They had met properly about a year before in June 1797 and had experienced together a kind of Anos Mirabalus when they wrote lyrical ballads, fell in love with one of those genius, as it were. and with Dorothy alongside, they decided they would go to Germany. It was Coleridge who mainly wanted to go there because he wanted to learn German. He wanted to study at one of the universities to study philosophy, particularly Kantian philosophy. And also, he wanted to get away from his wife and two young children.

Things were not going very well there. But for Wordsworth and Dorothy, it was really more a case of going with Coleridge, who was a kind of magnet for them at this point. Later, Wordsworth became the magnet to draw Coleridge up to the least. district after they came back from Germany. But they went off to Germany together. Wordsworth and Dorothy because they were hard up. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth had no income of any sort. They hadn't got a profession. They wanted to be poets. They wanted to be poets together. They wanted to live cheaply and they had heard that life in Germany was cheaper. So for Wordsworth and Dorothy, it was more

a case of going with Coleridge to have some cheap accommodation and try and learn something about the German language and Germany, but really the Wordsworth's hearts were not quite in that in the way that Coleridge's was. So they fetched up, Wordsworth and Dorothy, they fetched up in Gosler, this pretty little town in the Hearts Mountains. Coleridge quickly went on to Ratzaburg

and then to Göttingen where he studied, and he stayed longer, in fact. He went on to do what he'd be planned to do. But the Wordsworth stayed in Germany and felt homesick for England. And as you said, Wordswis started writing poetry, remembering his child.

in the lakes. And this became the start of the prelude. It's very interesting that how, first and fourth of all, how broke they were, and how abandoned they felt when Coleridge left them. And they didn't seem to find it very easy to learn German, or particularly want to learn German. And so they were isolated the two of them. And this unhappiness, this home sickness,

this really longing to be back in this childhood that they had not spent together, which set him off writing. Yes, that's the important thing, that Wordsworth and Dorothy had been separated as children of, to the death of their mother when Wordsworth was eight and Dorothy was a year or so younger. And they had come together more recently and they just were desperate to stay in one another's company

and Dorothy was a sort of perfect help meet until Wordsworth later married for a poet. And the two poets together really they did want to live together and work together as they had done on lyrical ballads, but there were also tensions between them and Coleridge had a different agenda. But at that stage Coleridge was very very,

much in the driving seat, Wordsworth was as overall by the mind of Coleridge, as indeed was almost everybody, a let's make it easier, everybody who met him by his range of his thought, by his philosophies, literature, his wit, and so on and so forth. And he had a project that he wanted Wordsworth to write.

This is my poet and I too am a poet, I, Coleridge of a poet, this poet I'm going to give a great project to because I see he can be a great genius. Can you briefly explain what that project was? Yes, that's right. Well, Coleridge saw that as he immediately thought, Wordsworth was the greater poet.

Wordsworth also, I think, felt this, although everyone, as you say, was absolutely magnetised by Corridge's brilliant conversation. But Coleridge wanted to be a philosopher as well as a poet, but he wanted Wordsworth to write the philosophical poem. And so all along from any years, in fact, as late as 1804, when Wordsworth is having a second go at the prelude,

his writing to Coleridge, who by that time is in Malta for his health, he's writing saying, where are these notes from my philosophical point? So he wants help from Coleridge. And Corridge eggs him on, but doesn't provide the notes for this philosophical poem, which is going to be about everything, the world and everything.

Man, nature and society. That's right. Emma Mason, it could be said at the end of lyrical ballads, the poem lines written a few miles above Tintan Abbey, were a prelude to the prelude. In that poem, he is the style, you take us through that. Sure.

I mean, I think we can see Tintanabe, both as a springboard for the prelude, but also as a sort of mini-prelude, a kind of blueprint for that poem. Tintanabe is one of the only poems that Wordsworth felt that he really finished, and he argued quite a lot with Coleridge about which poem to put at the end of the lyrical ballads, and words have wanted it to be Tintanabe, because that poem is so different from the other poems in that volume, the other poems tend to be about suffering individuals that have been, variously sort of screwed over either by other people

or by the way in which society works, they're marginalised people. And in a way that when the reader comes to those poems in the lyrical ballads, they feel the suffering of those individuals. And then Tintan Abbey sort of gives you a way to feel affection for them at the end. It kind of produces a different kind of feeling. Also he's looking back on himself. He begins to look back on himself, not to his childhood, which happened in Goslar,

between himself, five years have passed. It begins five summers with a love. length of five long winters, and again I hear these waters rolling from their mountain springs and so on. And can you just develop a little bit more why you think that he's already moving in that direction, the direction which becomes the massive 14 book, Preliereld. Sure. I mean, I think, as Rosemary said, Collaridge was a philosophical poet and wanted Wordsworth to write this philosophical poem, The Recluse. And Wordsworth said that one of the reasons he couldn't do that was that he was more invested in,

memory than in philosophy. And so Wordsworth thinks that individual memories are important springboards for poetry, partly because everybody can have them, and so it's a sort of democratic process of writing poetry. And to that extent, I think Wordsworth feels that Tintanabe gives him a space to develop his individual self through memories that he tracks through their emotional content. And in lots of ways, as we'll come on to, the Prelude was originally entitled a poem to Coleridge. I think we could sort of see Tintanabia's a poem to Dorothy.

I mean, she's the figure there that kind of guides him through this poem. You gave me eyes, yeah. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. She being him, the younger him, when he takes her there. Well, she's a sort of anchor for his feelings, because she represents nature, but she also represents, you know, good emotion and sort of sibling affection, the two of them and with coleridge as well

become a kind of model of society and that they all love each other and kind of provide those bonds with each other. The prelude subtitled the growth of a poet's mind and from the very beginning, we know, we are told by Wordsworth that we're in the presence of a very great poet. It's extraordinary and convincing act of self-confidence,

isn't he? He talks about poetic numbers came spontaneously and clothed in priestly robe and he was set for holy purposes. This is when he's setting out to look for a subject and he did not lack the first great gift, the vital soul. This is a 28-year-old talking about himself, sending himself to do this great poem.

It's very, in the light of the fact that it turned out to be a great poem, it's both touching as well as confident, isn't it? What do you make of that? Well, I think it is touching. The lyrical ballads haven't done particularly well. Yeah, I mean, it hadn't done particularly well, but I think what he had found in writing the lyrical ballads was what he thought poetry should do,

which was to foster one's feelings and make more subtle the sensibility of others. So whether or not lyrical ballads sold a lot, he had achieved what he wanted from it, which was to kind of have a very strong emotional connection with Coleridge and Dorothy. And his poetic vocation comes very strongly from the fact that he thinks he's the figure to re-emotionalize

a dead society in Britain. And he's reacting very much against sort of strong ideas of rationality and reason that the Enlightenment has kind of pushed on people. How would you characterize the dead society? A society that is a reasoning machine that is invested in progress, that it's invested in industrialisation, in capitalism,

in ideas that are about an abstract idea of collective good as opposed to a real individual idea. idea of collective feeling. Stephen Gill, it's very tough to ask you this as the first question, but can you give us some, give the listeners a rough outline of the story of the Prelude? Yes. The Prelude isn't what a biographical poem. The first part concerns words with Charter in the Lake Districts,

and that's probably the part of the poem most people enjoy with its kind of rich evocation of childhood joys and sports with his friends and so on. And it follows through chronologically from youth in the Lake District, University of Cambridge, an amazing walking tour of Europe with a friend called Robert Jones where they walk something like 2,000 miles to reach and cross the Alps. We have an account of his life in London. And then, of course, the poem takes us to words worth, in France, revolutionary France

from 1791, 3 to about 93. And the poem concludes with Wordsworth back in this country, meeting Coleridge writing lyrical ballads. So chronologically, broadly, it follows the line from Wordsworth's birth. There's a moment when he's at the mother's breast in this poem through to the lyrical ballad summer of 1798 when he's 28 years old.

And although he, as I've said, he's calling for philosophical reinforcements from Malta, to which Coleridge has gone for his health, there is a philosophy going through it. I mean, the last three books are talking about the imagination, he's talking about nature, he's talking, I mean, he is talking thought as well as talking description and autobiography. Yes, he is.

And I think it is the growth of the mind, and that's very much of the forefront. It is, indeed. But I think what we have, In reading the poem, what we are aware of all the time, is that as it were, there are two timescales at work here for the growth of this poet's mind. On the one hand, there's what I've just described,

which is the chronology of the poem, from his birth to 28 years old. But the poem, even the 1805 poem, took six years to write, and while he was doing it, Wordsworth wasn't sitting still. And so inscribed in this 13-book poem, is also wordsworth's growth from 1798 through to 1805. And I think you can see that particularly strongly,

the influence of Coleridge particularly strongly, in the books you've mentioned, where he's talking about imagination, love and so on. It can be regarded in one way as three shots. The outburst in 1798 and 9, which is two books, which is still in many ways, one line like it first. It's straight to the point. And then he reorganised that by 1805 with another great burst.

I'm just going to you from you actually. The way he pushes now and becomes 13 books. Not books in the sense of novels, but I mean in the length. I'm just trying to not put people off. It isn't that long. And then it works on it until 1850. Tinkers around with it. Tinkers again is your word. These bursts of composition are extraordinary, aren't they?

Yes, yes, yes. between in 1804 and 1805, perhaps 13 months or so, Wordsworth writes many thousands of lines of concentrated blank verse. Just as the two book poem, which as you say, many will agree with you, in fact, is the most wonderful, compressed, high-quality poetry that Wordsworth ever wrote. That must all have been completed within a year. What I think is, in a sense, repeat what I've already said there, and what you've said, he lives with this poem for the rest of his life.

There are no more bursts of composition of such intensity and length as there were in 18445. But we have to imagine wordsworth growing old, 40 years old, 50 years old, 60 years old. He's 69 years old when he last revises this poem. And it's a poem, you know, Queen Victoria's on the throne. He's a famous man, he's an old man, and he's writing about himself in the French Revolution. He's going back to it, and he's living with it. I just want to ask each of you briefly, so to get this out of the way,

and then we can move on. He finished a great version of this in 1805. He read it to, it was the poem to Coleridge. He read it to Coleridge a couple of years later in Beaumont's house with other people there. Right. there it is. They all said, Masterpiece, and indeed

they were right to say it. He didn't publish it, well, he didn't publish it, he died, in 1850, his wife published it after that. Now, briskly, because there's so many theories about this, can each of you give me your theory why he let it, as it were, languish from 1807, in the sense of publication, until 1850. Can we start with you, Emma?

Well, I think that he simply had not finished the poem and thought that he would. I mean, there's part of him that is still trying to write the requirements, Cluce right up until the point that he dies. And the prelude is... And the big project, you mean, yes. And the prelude is the introduction to that big project. And, you know, he hasn't finished the introduction yet.

But also, I think there's something that Wordsworth wants to say about, you know, the nature of existence, that it's splintered and fractured. And you can't finish it. It's always in process. And if you sort of arrest those details in a fixed autobiography, you've sort of crushed life itself. Stephen, briefly, why do you think he didn't publish? Well, there's an official view. which is his.

In 1814, he published his large philosophical work, the one philosophical work that Wordsworth did write, the excursion. And in the preface to the excursion, he explains to everybody that there is another poem, an autobiographical poem, which is a prelude to this one, which is where the poem gets the title.

Wordsworth never, ever used the title, the prelude. He says, this autobiographical poem does exist, but of course I shan't, it until the philosophical work is complete. I think that's very honourable, in a way, he's saying, who will want to know about me until I've done the big job? And what's your version? Well, that's all true and absolutely correct.

I think, though, one of the things to think about is that in 1805, when he's finishing the prelude, he is writing to friends, to Sir George Beaumont, whom you mentioned a moment ago, one of his sort of patrons, as it were, he's writing saying, it's an unprecedented thing that anyone should write at such length about himself. And so he is aware that he is thinking of it as preparatory to a larger poem which didn't get

written. But the extraordinary thing is that neither he nor Coleridge seems to have quite grasped that the prelude is that philosophical poem. And that's an extraordinary thing. They don't seem to have thought that. They still seem to have thought that Wordsworth would go on and write more. He did go on and write the excursion, which is almost unreadable. I mean, I'm a Werswedian and others.

me, disagree with me, it's almost unreadable. The reason being, and it's Coridge who points this out in his critical work biography, a literaria, a reason being that Wordsworth there doesn't talk about himself. He tries to talk about a wanderer, a solitary, a hermit, you know, other people, but he gives them some of his own experiences, childhood experiences, but they're all at a distance. And the exertion was absolutely hammered, and that might have been, given that he was understandably, as many people are, prickly about what would happen to him in and that this was autobiographical, and this was wide open to attacking his personality and his private life as well as everything. That might also be a factor.

He describes himself as being in the prelude, it's being brought it by nature, a wonderful line, fostered alike by beauty and by fear. Can you tell us about nature in that respect inside the prelude, Rosemary? Yes. Everyone knows about Wordsworth as the nature poet. People who haven't read perhaps the prelude will know about the poem to daffodels and so on, and they will know about Tintan Abbey perhaps. And he really does take the palm for being the poet who experiences in his childhood and then recalls to mind, as he often says in the prelude, fetches back, as he also says, he uses these rather physical terms

for remembering his favoured childhood in beautiful natural surroundings. And as he grew up, and as he grew up in a young man at the time of the French Revolution, political, radical ideas came together, democratic ideas such as Emma's already talked about and that all seemed to go very well with a love of nature and being at the root of things. Yes, but what was his route to nature? Because it was, other people had said it in something,

but he said it with such emphasis at such length, with such conviction that he influenced two centuries of people. He did. So can you just get us to the root of it? Yes. Well, it's partly his good fortune in being brought up in the lakes. but it's also due to his ill fortune. Because of the then wild landscape.

And how that fitted with childhood wildness. He's obviously allowed to run about and enjoy nature. That's one thing. You're like a savage. I mean, when you look at the way he walked as a little boy and the things he did, it was unlicensed in where he went, say... Climbing cliffs at age nine or whatever and stealing birds' eggs and that kind of thing

that he writes about so beautifully in the prelude. But I mean, I think also it comes to do with a kind of questioning of religion. He becomes, early on, he's rather pantheistic so that God is found in nature. And to some extent, because he lost his mother at 8 and his father at 13, there is a school of thought with which I have some sympathy, which says that nature stood in as parents for him. He more or less says that himself with fostered alike by beauty and by fear. Stephen Gill, there are many extracts which show the power that nature brought to bed,

on him. I think that one that you particularly like involves a row across Windermere. Can you read a bit of it to us and explain why you find it so powerful? Yes, with pleasure. The poet's a schoolboy

and he's been playing with his friends in front of an inn by the side of the lake. And the evening comes on. And he describes the pleasure they've taken in the afternoon. The garden lay upon a slope, surmounted by the plain of a small bowling green. Beneath us stood a grove with gleams of water through the trees and over the tree-tops,

nor did we want refreshment, strawberries and mellow cream, and there, through half an afternoon, we played on the smooth platform, and the shouts we sent made all the mountains ring. But ere the fall of night, when in our pinnus we returned over the dusky lake, and to the beach of some small island steered our course with one the minstrel of our troop, and left him there, and rode off gently, while he blew his flute alone upon the rock. Oh, then the calm and dead still water lay upon my mind, even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, never before so beautiful, sank down into my heart,

and held me like a dream. I think what I like about this passage is it's first of all wordsworth giving a sense of the pleasure he took with his friends. They are just little boys shouting and making the mountains ring. But then the passage turns into one emphasizing the quiet and the isolation of this little minstrel on his rock.

But most of all, and this is where I pick up something that Rosemary just said a moment ago. Look at the language of this. It's all about your body being taken over by the outside world. The dead still water lay upon my mind.

The sky sinks down into my heart and the pleasure of it all is a weight. One of wordsworth's, most use words, is joy. And one of the things that I value most in him

is the emphasis he puts on trying to foster that in children. Emma Mason, can we take another small passage, and thank you very much for that, and do much the same thing, with the notion of spots of time, which is one of the many, many things that people can pick out the pressure. Anyway, spots of time, there you go. Yeah, I mean, I think that spots of time actually takes us directly

into words with two main interests. I think that throughout Wordsworth's career, he's most interested in consciousness, the way in which we get to know ourselves, and affection, the way in which we learn to love others through knowing ourselves. And spots of time are, is his phrase for memories

that he can kind of call on from the past and use to what he calls sort of renovate himself or fructify himself. And in fact, he uses different words in different editions. In the earlier editions, he uses the word fructify to suggest. that memories are sort of fruitful for him. In the later editions, in the very last edition,

he uses the word renovate to suggest that memories somehow restore him. But what's very important about the spots of time is that they're not nostalgia. He's not suggesting that we kind of go back into our memories and just sort of sit there and indulge in them. Memories are only important to words with as they impact on your present moment. So it's about allowing yourself to kind of feel in your present,

in your present moment there. And present feeling can be underpinned by past feeling, even if the past feeling was opposite their present feeling. Your pleasure today can be enhanced by the fact of looking back on a bleakness, a very similar situation long ago. Absolutely, yeah, because I think that, as Stephen said, he's most concerned with the feeling of joy. But the other feeling he's most concerned with is grief.

And his whole poetic process is really to think about how you can translate grief into joy through recalling memories in poetic form. And it's poetic form that is most important here because one of the things that Wordsworth wants to tell his readers is you're not going to find solace in big things in life in these kind of massive adventures. You're going to find solace in the things that you do every day and your everyday feeling in those things that you do habitually and regularly.

And the thing that poetry does, of course, is give us that kind of rhythm of everyday life and sort of somehow teaches us how to, literally teaches us how to feel. Rosemary Heson, continuing with just the particular, one of the most quoted lines from the prelude is bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. Now, can you unwrap that both in terms of the particularity of its place in the prelude, and what it meant to words of us?

Yes, well, it is, as you say, a reference to his, feelings as he remembers them as a young man, immediately after the French Revolution, when everybody pretty well hoped that this would, that the revolutionary fervour would sweep through the whole of Europe and freedom and

equality and so on, brotherhood of man and so on would occur. But it's interesting that he writes this, remembers this feeling and you can hear the swell, bliss was it in that born to be alive, it breaks the iambic form which the poem normally takes, but he does

is quite a lot in this prophetic, as it were, way. Bliss, was it in that dawn. But that comes in the story, in the telling of the prelude, after he's already given us a whole book and a half about his going to France, which he did, as Stephen said earlier, a couple of times from 1791 onwards, after which he's already told us of the disappointment when the terror occurred and when the guillotine was being used every second minute

and when the Jacobins and the Chirondins fell out and all the hopes for France and the rest of Europe, by analogy, had fallen flat. So he then at this point goes back to remember, again, to fetch back, what was it like before I went and found that actually things were disappointing in post-revolutionary France? And he does this quite a lot. So in this sense, it's a chronological poem, but it's also one which can use for best effect,

for best dramatic emotional effect, a slight change of chronology. It's interesting for me that he uses the word dawn, which takes it straight back to nature. Yes, that's right. It does. Stephen Gill and Gaines, there we are.

In 1802, my heart leaps up when I behold. I mean, this is while he's writing the prelude, or why think about the proletes, in the middle of the prelude sequence. He wrote the child is father of man. And you've said, I think, very teasingly, that words was pre- Freudian. in this? Oh, did I?

Yes, you did this. Well, the most important passage of all, I think, and so I would stay with that, although feels slightly embarrassed by the term now, is we mustn't overlook this. In the second book of the poem,

Wordsworth says, he wants to write about the growth of human personality. Where can one start? Where might one begin? And at that moment, says, well, we must begin at the beginning. Blessed the infant babe. And in the passage, God, he takes the child back to the mother's breast and describes the impact of love upon the baby from the mother.

And it's the mother's love that guarantees this child's, his word, apprehensiveness, his ability to learn about the world. Well, if this isn't pre-fraud, you know, I don't know what is. And all of this is written in 1799. And he's also pre-the-linguistic studies that are going on. He talks about things that cannot be described in words. Yes. And then he goes on to attempt to do so.

Emma Mason, sticking to the particular, before we move on to the reception and so on, the poem is full of immense numbers of details of particular incidents, of rocks and ponds. You know what I'm talking about soldiers drifting around and so on. What was he looking for in all this detail? Is there a unifying ambition on his part in that? Yeah, I mean, I think his unifying ambition is to make himself feel good

and to make readers feel good and to show them how to do that. And for all that, you know, the poem is about nature. I mean, one could say that really nature didn't mean in the 18th, 19th century what we think it did. It doesn't mean sort of non-urban kind of rural, national trusty type places. It means a kind of realm of. intuitions and affections that is nevertheless kind of linked to the natural world. But he's not a pastoral poet. He's not someone that idealises the landscape.

And that's one of the reasons that the excursion gets attacked because it doesn't describe nice flowers and daffodils. He's not interested in that. What he is interested in is very specific meetings with individual people, which is what he describes through the prelude. Meetings with discharge soldiers, often with the dead. with people from his own community so that he can show that relating to the world

has to be a particular and a human experience, not something where you kind of abstractly go into nature on your own, but something that is sort of carried through your relationship with other people. Well, nature, the way that nature interpenetrated his mind and his body, as Stephen pointed out in that passage which he generalised, I thought brilliantly, that he gave moral value, as he says, to rocks moral value to streams, moral value to the stones on the road, I think, and that is an enormous thing to say.

It's one sense you can say, what are you talking about? Another sense you think, well, let's think about it. There's something going on there, which people have explored in many ways ever since. Do you like to take that over? Well, I was just going to add to what Emma said, that it's absolutely right, that he is very keen on describing his encounters with other people and so on, usually in external nature, usually when walking somewhere. But the main thing is the effect that the meeting with other people had on him and on his mind,

because this poem is absolutely wonderful in connecting that love, that direct love of external nature with a real attempt at psychologizing himself. It's the first great psychological poem, hard task to analyze a soul, he says, because in the poem he rehearses what it is that he's doing in the poem. So he says, he's hard to do. And in the passage spots of time, he says, he talks about those moments in childhood, by which our minds are nourished. There's another wonderful word which fits with the mother and the baby, are nourished and invisibly repaired. Well, if they're invisibly repaired, how can you then grasp them again?

And that's the task that he sets himself. And he faces the difficulties. And he describes the difficulties. And it's really a poem about the writing of the poem, which is just extraordinary, I think. So it's the inner life in a way, which is important. In 1807, as I mentioned, Wordsworth completed the, as he thought. Anyway, Emma says he never completed. He had the poem.

He took his time. He said it was complete. He said it was complete. He went down to George Bowman's house and Coleridge's great friend. He had a bit of a falling out. I came back from it. He read it to Coleridge. And as you said, I think, earlier, it was always called the poem to Coleridge.

And Wordsworth always called it that. He never called it to Prejudice of a problem. And that was a great account. for both of them. Would you like to briskly tell us what happened that evening? Well, those evenings, it wasn't just one. It was several evenings in which

Coleridge, back from Malta, sat and heard this poem read by his friend's wonderful deep voice, as he describes, in the poem that Coleridge immediately, almost immediately sat down to write. Poem, on listening to the poem. Two William Wordsworth, after having listened to this poem.

And in this, Coleridge performs the greatest kind of of compliment to his friend and greater poet as he thought. That is he writes consciously wordsworthy in poem. He rehearses, in this short poem, he rehearses what Wordsworth is talking about in the poem. He reinforces Wordsworth's notion, as expressed in the poem, about what an important task it is to talk about the growth of a poet's mind.

It's not just individual, it's an important, it's a high argument, heroic task. And Coleridge feeds us back to him in this short poem. And it actually becomes quite rhapsodic, talks about it as a prophetic lay, an orphic song, and says that in the end, the poem ends, after hearing thy deep voice, after it had ceased, I sat, my being blended in one thought.

Thought was it, or aspiration, or resolve, absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound. And when I rose, I found myself in prayer. It was slightly pious. But that idea of yet hanging still upon the sound is actually a kind of wordsworthian phrase, that kind of physicality of the mental response to the poem. Briefly, Emma, we've heard about Coleridge's involvement with this.

Was anyone else involved in the composition of this poem, would you say? Absolutely. I mean, Dorothy and Mary had a sort of huge influence on Wordsworth, but I think one of the other figures that we might remember is his brother John Wordsworth, who had an immense impact on Wordsworth, again, as a model of, affection and feeling. Because the family would just tell us, the family was very much split up, early deaths, deaths, spread out

among aunts and uncles and grandparents all over the north of England. So maybe cod psychology they sort each other out very closely from then on. That'll do it, right. There you go. Absolutely, and I suppose that's one thing that we might sort of say about, even though Wordsworth does idealise childhood,

what he's actually saying is not that you have to have that love as a young child, but that you somehow, have to learn how to repeat or get that feeling in your adult life if you haven't had it as a child, which is part of what the prelude is trying to do. I mean, he does use the relationships with his siblings as models for feeling. And I think that John, Wordsworth is a very important figure.

Wordsworth calls him a silent poet. John never writes any poetry, unlike Dorothy, of course. But the idea of being a silent poet suggests that for Wordsworth, poetry isn't really about the reading or, linguistic content. It is about the emotional content, which is why it's so important that he reads it to Coleridge, because

it's the feeling that the readers have at the end of the poem that is important to him, rather than the process of reading. And he says that very clearly in the preface to the lyrical ballads where he says that feeling is what gives importance to actions and situations, not actions

and situations to feeling itself. Stephen Gill, although the poem was, wasn't published, until 1850 after his death, clearly he read it to Coleridge and other people at Bowman's house. We know that De Quincey read it. Twinsie is enormous, who's incredibly enthusiastic for Coleridge, came to Lake District

to be near, about Wordsworth, came to Lestrich to be near Wordsworth and read it and quoted from it, because of this phenomenal memory, Dorothy knew about it, Walter Scott stayed at them, and knew about in McCauley, read it and thought it was a dreadful socialist, Jacobinical thing. Did it inform

English literature and poetry over the next I can't we get out, 45 years, or was it just little dots here? Did it have any influence? Not really, I don't think it did, no. I think Wordsworth did. Wordsworth's impact upon writers such as George Elliott,

most particularly, Elizabeth Gaskell. Tennyson was huge. But it's 1850. He's 80 years old, he's just died. Wordsworth's collected volumes are six or seven volumes as a lot of Wordsworth. In 1850, does anybody really want to read another 13-book poem? So you take someone like Matthew Arnold, who was in a way the most influential taste-setter in Wordsworth terms

in the later Victorian period. Arnold regards Wordsworth as a lyric poet and barely makes a mention of the prelude. As later as the 1880s and 90s, publishers are still putting out collections of Wordsworth in which they don't include the prelude. Well, they can't, as a matter of fact, for copyright reasons, but we'll let that pass. They put in little notes at the front saying the prelude is not the equal of his other works.

So I think the real answer, much as I'd like to say the opposite, is that, no, I don't think it greatly influenced in the Stitcher for the next 40-odd years. But part of the reason, and that's right, I agree with that, but part of the reason is, of course, the poem wasn't published until 1850. He tinkered with it, as we said, over many, many years.

part of that tinkering was a kind of watering down of the freshness and the boldness, the idea that he was a favoured son of nature. That kind of went. A few more references to a Christian god creep in as Wordsworth became more conventionally religious as he got older. And it was a slightly duller poem. It was still a great poem, but it was a slightly duller poem. The other thing I suppose is that by that time, it's a long time since the French Revolution. It's a long time since the pre-railway age.

And I think the Victorians were obviously interested in other things. And one of the criticisms that was made of the poem was rather disappointingly received by the critics in 1850 on the whole. And one of the things was objections to it was that it was all about himself. It wasn't about humanity and other people, readers thought. And by the Victorian period when you've got all the social problem novels of Gaskell and Dickens and so on, It somehow didn't seem to be a poem of that era in which it was published, and nor was it. In Memorium came out that year and completely out so early, never that's the intriguing thing,

had you brought out in 1807, it would have hit the note, wouldn't it? Were you going to say that Emma or something else? No, absolutely. I mean, what I was just going to say was that however much we might not like the excursion, it's really the excursion that the Victorians love as a poem. And I think even though there is this sort of overwhelming popularity of the novel in the Victorian period, Wordsworth does hold an enormously important place for many poets that we don't read so often now. A lot of women poets who were kind of gathering their sense of self for the first time,

women like Dora Greenwell, Adelaide, Anne Proctor. These were women who were extremely popular in their own day and did find the Prelude, in fact, a sort of important book about developing the self. And I mean, I think that we have to sort of recognise in a way that the Victorians found immense consolation in the Prelude as they did in Memorium. both poems kind of providing sort of alternative space to the church for allowing their kind of religious sensibilities to operate. Stephen, you've come in on that.

Yes, I just think it's something you said about, if it had been published in 1807, it would have hit a nerve. My goodness me, it would. One of the wonderful things about the poem is that Wordsworth doesn't blench from telling us what his political ideals were in the 1790s. and in book 10, I think it is, there's a passage where Wordsworth describes himself, praying for French victories, kneeling in an English church and being the only person there,

not offering up prayers for our nation's victories. Well, by the time he wrote those words, William Wordsworth was a member of the Grasmere militia and was a staunch patriot. But he wrote them, that's the point. And he didn't delete them, either. And he did not delete them. Now, as far as we said, when those come out in 1850, well, it's a long time ago. But in 187, that would have been dynamite.

Do you think he achieved, I'm still intrigued any writer would be by the wonderful self-confidence. I mean, where does that come from? In the end, he talks about thy monument of glory will be raised, about his own book. He does. Well, but it's more endearing than that might sound, although that was all, you know, Keats spoke about the egotistical sublime. Keith hadn't read the prelude, but he had read to it. and some of the other poems, which, as we've said, have elements, and the excursion have elements of the prelude-type poem in them.

He is self-confident, but he's also, he needs bold string a lot of the time, and that's one of the purposes that Coleridge fulfills in the poem. He's constantly being addressed as my friend, my brother poet. You are my ideal reader. You'll read it, if nobody else. Well, there's nothing else for anybody to do, but go and read the prelude over the next one to two with enormous pleasure and delight. by the three of you. Thank you very much, Emma Mason, Rosemary Ashton and Stephen Gill.

And next week we're talking about the Fibonacci sequence, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, petals, and the rest of it. Thanks for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.