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The Illusion of Mastery: Wordsworth's Revisions of “The Drowned Man of Esthwaite,” 1799, 1805, 1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Susan J. Wolfson
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Abstract

In the continuing controversies over the value of the 1805 Prelude versus the 1850 text-to which some voices have added a case for the 1799 version-the importance of Wordsworth's character as a revising poet has been neglected. One episode present in all three versions, his boyhood discovery of a man drowned in Esthwaite's Lake, offers a productive case study-both for the play of Wordsworth's revisions and for a view of The Prelude as a poem constituted by its many texts, rather than by anyone authoritative text. Wordsworth's most emphatic revision is the addition of a commentary that denies the boy's fear and converts the corpse into a figure of “ideal grace,” like something in a literary “romance.” Yetother revisions of both text and context reveal Wordsworth's ambivalence about the strategies of argumentative mastery with which he would govern the mysteries that inhabit his imagination.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 99 , Issue 5 , October 1984 , pp. 917 - 935
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by The Modern Language Association of America

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