Postscript - Wordsworth in 1850

Summary

The postscript to the book turns briefly to Wordsworth’s Prelude, published in 1850 after his death. Wordsworth, in publishing The Prelude, addressed to Coleridge and offering an account of his life up until 1805, engages in a kind of time travel, creating not so much spots of time as a time warp where he can leap over the younger Cockney poets who shaped his later work to recover his early life with close associates such as Coleridge, his fellow Laker. The reviews of Wordsworth’s poem already show how he would become the central figure in a version of romanticism that turned from narrative to lyric and from public, political poetry to private, philosophical verse on the relationship between the poet and nature.