About Wordsworth,

The Prelude and memory:

The Prelude is a literary masterpiece, the first major autobiographical poem in English. Wordsworth initially completed a two-part version in 1799 when he was 29 years old. By 1805 he had developed the poem into a thirteen-part epic of 8,487 lines, and repeatedly returned to work on it throughout his life. It was not until 1850, just after his death, that The Prelude was published. To Wordsworth, The Prelude was the ‘poem on the growth of my own mind’, begun as an exploration of the experiences that made him a poet.

Wordsworth believed that some of our childhood experiences have a lifelong and beneficial influence: for him, these ‘spots of time’ were boyhood activities that took an extraordinary turn, leading unexpectedly to powerful feelings of fear or joy. Wordsworth describes such incidents in his autobiographical poem The Prelude, including stealing a boat, skating on Windermere and mimicking the hooting of an owl. Wordsworth believes these that these experiences happen to us all: through their continuing influence on us, ‘our minds are nourished and visibly repaired’ and our creative imaginations developed.