Andy Brown's Blog Post on Book First of William Wordsworth's Prelude of 1805

Wordsworth describes his struggles with writers block in lines 238-271 of Book First of the 1805 Prelude. His description of the struggle writers go through to produce meaningful work resonated especially well with me, seeing as I am currently writing this blog post and it is well past midnight. My despair is lessened upon careful consideration of the circumstances of Wordsworth’s struggle with a lack of poetic agency. These lines were new for the 1805 version of The Prelude, which means that in the time between 1799, when the first version of the poem was completed, and 1805, when this version was finished, William Wordsworth had still not made meaningful progress on The Recluse, his planned mother-of-all-philosophy-poems Poem. In fact, he would die before ever finishing or even really making significant progress on this philosophical epic.

Worse yet for the poet, he cannot even seem to come to terms with his need to write The Recluse. Is it a “vague longing that is bred by want of power” (241) or is it a “paramount impulse not to be withstood” (242)? His project is not getting off the ground because of the conflict between his own timidity and the necessity to write the poem, his prudence and his propensity for delay (243-244). The poet’s negative emotions, such as anger, self-pity, and helplessness, come through on the page, juxtaposed with the early optimism he displayed at the beginning of Book First. The “mild creative breeze” that filled Wordsworth with poetic energy in line 43 has given way to “a mind that every hour / turns recreant to her task, takes heart again, / then feels immediately some hollow thought / hang like an interdict upon her hopes” (259-262).

The passage that begins on line 271 after the conclusion of the “writers block” passage, confirms that Wordsworth had been stuck on The Recluse for quite some time. It is the same passage that opened the first part of the two part Prelude of 1799. The question asked, “Was it for this”, is the same, and the passage is exactly the same as it was in 1799, indicating that the poet had not made enough progress on the planned philosophical poem to satisfy himself. The issues that he was having in 1799 were the same that worried him in 1805. By this time, however, Wordsworth seems convinced that he would have been better off whiling away his days without the specter of unwritten Recluse haunting him. Had not the grand idea of The Recluse occurred to him, he could have spent his days in ”vacant musing, unreproved neglect / of all things, and deliberate holiday” (255-256) without worrying about the hours lost in the process.

One feels sympathy with Wordsworth when he complains that his creative faculties are “in blank reserve” (248) and that progress on The Recluse is stuck in the limbo of “infinite delay” (244). Unfortunately for Wordsworth, though, this limbo was not to be of the Dantean type, filled with poets, philosophers, and other great and creative types who in antiquity produced fine works of philosophy in Latin and Greek. Instead, his Recluse was to be condemned to the Miltonic depths of Pandæmonium for all time, never to come to fruition. The hope of potential readers was abandoned, and the paradisiacal pleasure of reading The Recluse was to be forever lost when Wordsworth died in 1850 without having written The Recluse. Truly, a writers block of hellish proportions.