The Prelude

The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem is an autobiographical poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Intended as the introduction to the more philosophical Recluse, which Wordsworth never finished, The Prelude is an extremely personal and revealing work on the details of Wordsworth's life. Wordsworth began The Prelude in 1798 at the age of 28 and continued to work on it throughout his life. He never gave it a title; he called it the "Poem (title not yet fixed upon) to Coleridge" and in his letters to Dorothy Wordsworth referred to it as "the poem on the growth of my own mind". The poem was unknown to the general public until published three months after Wordsworth's death in 1850, its final name given to it by his widow Mary.

The Prelude is widely regarded as Wordsworth's greatest work.

There are three versions of the poem:

The Prelude was the product of a lifetime: for the last part of his life, Wordsworth had been "polishing the style and qualifying some of its radical statements about the divine sufficiency of the human mind in its communion with nature".

The poem was intended as the prologue to a long three-part epic and philosophical poem, The Recluse. Though Wordsworth planned this project when he was in his late 20s, he went to his grave at 80 years old having written to some completion only The Prelude and the second part (The Excursion), leaving no more than fragments of the rest.

Wordsworth planned to write this work together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, their joint intent being to surpass John Milton's Paradise Lost (Table Talk II.70–71; IG3). Had The Recluse been completed, it would have been approximately three times longer than Paradise Lost (33,000 lines versus 10,500); often, in his letters, Wordsworth commented that he was plagued with agony because he failed to finish the work. In the 1850 introduction, Wordsworth explains what the original idea, inspired by his "dear friend" Coleridge, was: "to compose a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and Society, and to be entitled the Recluse; as having for its principal subject, the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement."

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