This Life, This Death: Wordsworth’S Poetic Destiny

Book excerpt: Looking ahead to the 250th anniversary of Wordsworths birth, this small book challenges fresh questions about where Wordsworth stood in his poetic production in the great years of creative ferment between 1798 and 1806. Numerous poems are covered from this period, but especially does this book re-think our traditional conception of the relationship between The Prelude and Intimations. Wordsworth is separated from the visionary life he once knew by the interdictive effects of his obsession with The Recluse, the great philosophical poem he never finished. In the meantime he takes up with The Prelude but the essential Wordsworth remains the one who, in Intimations, turns his attention back, yearningly, to the visionary gleam. With The Prelude the epic poet comes through, but Wordsworth the visionary poet is lost, and it concerns him all the more now that he feels he faces death and a new darkness, the darkness of the grave, without the life that he once knew.