CUNY Academic Commons

From the British Library’s digitized literature collection. I’m studying Wordsworth’s preludes in Josh Wilner’s Romantic autobiography class. I’ve always found W’ quite boring, though I am enthralled with all the other Lake Poets, including his sister Dorothy. Doing class readings of the poem, which transformed many times, and especially this source handwritten manuscript has helped me to see the grammar and rhetoric behind the highly influential and ultimately the superlatively canonical work of romantic autobiography. Without the dramatics and perversions of Rousseau’s confessions, there is nonetheless a structural logic to its production that creates a lullaby like quality, hypnotic in its monotony. This early draft reveals his careful lineations, and changes to perfect this style.