Unlike the other articles that we have discussed, this is an essay transcribed from a lecture (fourth in a series on Contemporary Criticism and the Problem of Romanticism) delivered in 1967 and 1972. There are numerous references to Geoffrey Hartman's text, Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814, and to previous lectures in the same series, but the essay is still able to delineate De Man's arguments easily and accessibly in spite of its oral intention.

Although presented 30 years and published here (1987) 10 years previously, the article still seems useful in that De Man discusses the issue of time in Wordsworth's poetry. Although he does not discuss The Prelude as a whole except in a rather "macrocosmic" fashion, he explicates what he feels are several key passages within the text along with various other poems and texts of Wordsworth's.

De Man begins with a refreshing recognition that critics often bring agendas to a text. He states, "[t]he grimace becomes even more painful when the directives of the score [the text] and those of the interpreter are pulling in different directions" (4). He goes on to say that a text, Wordsworth especially, must be "interpreted from the inside, from the phenomenological point of view of his own consciousness" (5). While De Man concedes that he and Hartman agree on this point he feels that Hartman has mis-located that central focus of the Wordsworth's poetry in general and specifically in The Prelude. He proposes, although tentatively, that the "key to understanding Wordsworth lies in the relationship between imagination and time, not in the relationship between imagination and nature" (16).

He supports this claims firstly by engaging in a close discussion of "The Winander Boy" passage, originally a separate poem and then part of The Prelude (1805.V. 389ff; 1850.V.364ff). De Man focuses on the use of the words "hung" in the first section of the passage and then "hangs" in the second. He claims that this word, in past and present tense, connects the passage in that it

establishes the thematic link between the two parts and names a central Wordsworthian experience. At that moment when the analogical correspondence with nature no longer asserts itself, we discover that the earth under our feet is not the stable base in which we can believe ourselves to be anchored . . . the experience is a literal moment of dizziness . . . (7)

This moment of "dizziness" in the first section then becomes a signal to the reader foreshadowing the upcoming tragedy of the boy's death. He also quotes Wordsworth himself in support of this idea. De Man refers to Wordsworth's "Preface to Poems" in which he discusses the use of the word "hangs".

From this point, De Man suggests that since the poem was originally written in the first person and was referring to Wordsworth, himself as a boy, then the movement of the text from first to third person (in The Prelude) in the passage is autobiographical, "in a curious sense" (9). "It is the autobiography of someone who no longer lives written by someone who is speaking, in a sense, from beyond the grave . . . The structure of the poem, although it seems retrospective, is in fact proleptic" (9). It is from this movement or progression of argument that De Man derives his main assertion. Since to him The Prelude as a whole has this same feel, he then agrees with (the elusive) Hartman in saying that the entire poem "becomes an . . . extended epitaph" (9). The anticipatory aspects become indistinguishable from the "remembering" and, in this manner, time becomes the factor that is central in its relationship with the imagination for it is only through the imagination that this is/can be accomplished.

While seemingly a wild leap, De Man proposes the chasm is bridged by the image of the river. An odd notion, but he submits that the image of the river, "the powerful motion that dominates the entire poem" (12), connects the historical aspects of Wordsworth's life (in the poem) and the temporal consciousness of reflection. De Man concludes:

For Wordsworth, the relationships towards time have a priority over relationships towards nature; one finds, in his work, a persistent deepening of self-insight represented as a movement that begins in a contact with nature, then grows beyond nature to become a contact with time. (17)

Document created March 22, 1997