Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Great Tower of Babel, 1563

Wordsworth’s Prelude, subtitled “Growth of a Poet’s Mind,” exists in many versions, written throughout half a century and revised until the poet’s death. It seems fitting that there should be so many, expanding revisions in parallel with the accumulating layers of a life.

In an 1805 letter to the art patron Sir George Beaumont, Wordsworth says of his greatest work that it is “a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself.” During the many years that he wrote it, he did not think that he could be justified in “giving [his] own history to the world” unless he published it alongside a sober, philosophical work, The Recluse.

Wordsworth spent years talking about The Recluse without ever really writing it. But the idea was always there, in his correspondence, in his descriptions of future work, and in the rest of his poetry. In 1814, he published The Excursion, which he called “a Portion of The Recluse,” outlining the rest of the unwritten work in three sections. Eighteen years later, he had made little more progress on The Recluse, but had completed the fourteen-book Prelude and was still editing it. His daughter Dorothy wrote in a letter:

Mother and he work like slaves from morning to night—an arduous work—correcting a long poem, written 30 years back … and not to be published during his life, The Growth of his own Mind—the ante-chapel, as he calls it, to The Recluse.

Wordsworth’s procrastination on The Recluse seems almost pathological; and as the years pass, his constant references to it appear naive, even delusional. So much so that in reading them, one begins to wonder whether the looming idea of The Recluse, which was never written, might have been the driving force for completing The Prelude. Was the blueprint of a different great work the necessary illusion that allowed him to compose a different, equally demanding one?

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