"Preludium", czyli pół wieku samotności Williama Wordswortha
"The Prelude", or Fifty Years of Solitude of William Wordsworth

Author(s): Eliza Borkowska
Subject(s): Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, 19th Century, Philology, British Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: William Wordsworth; Prelude; autobiography; self-creation; myth; memory
Summary/Abstract: The article reflects on the fifty odd years of solitude of William Wordsworth (1770–1850) during the process of the composition (1798–1805) and then the revision of his distinctly Romantic autobiographical poem "The Prelude", published posthumously in 1850. The leading English Romantics (Keats, Shelley, Byron, Blake) passed away in the 1820s. In the 1830s, Wordsworth commemorated in his minor poetry the deaths of Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, Hogg. His surviving contemporaries – including his beloved wife, sister, and daughter – all moved to the future, that is, the Victorian period. Wordsworth, the poet of the remembrance of things past, remained in the time recorded in "The Prelude" :the only living Romantic among the dead.

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