These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. The two-part Prelude of 1799 reveals how an apparently single-voiced point-of-view can emerge out of conflicting voices that vie for authority when any ‘I’ begins to speak. A regularly sequential pattern (silence - sound - voice - speaker - poet speaking) provides a recurring model for the way this poetic voice claims to have gained the authority necessary for speech. 1 In Wordsworth’s case, this process is complicated by the fact that the stories contributing to the unified ‘I-for-myself’ narrative (the phrase is also Bakhtin’s) do not always originate in human language, but in a series of human and nonhuman voices that create a dialogue within which the poet speaks by responding to other sounds and voices. Bakhtin claims that the ‘fragments’ of a life can mingle dialogically with the ‘stories told by others’ to produce an aesthetic object in which ‘the hero of a life may become the narrator of it’. The fact that the poem had its desired effect by 1805 - Coleridge wrote back to the author of the ‘poem to Coleridge’ with a poem entitled ‘To William Wordsworth’ - suggests that voices in dialogue are essential to our understanding of this earliest ‘complete’ version of Wordsworth’s poem on his own life.

Wordsworth’s two-part Prelude of 1799 is a poem about sounds and voices, about what sounds echo the voice of authority, and about how a number of voices contribute to the poetic making of a self-reflexive speaker who writes primarily for the sake of other people.

The two part prelude wordsworth