英文摘要 |
This paper argues that three episodes in William Wordsworth’s Two-Part Prelude (1799) are structurally incoherent but historically significant for Wordsworth writings in 1799. In the critical year of 1798, the milestone year when Tintern Abbey was written, Wordsworth abandoned his strong conviction in the ideas of the French Revolution and turned himself into a nature poet who interiorized politics in his poems. The Gothic motif, originally exploited to address social protest, was being transformed into the transcendental sublime of poetical imagination. The fact that the three episodes in the Two-Part Prelude (1799) are inconsistent with the rest of the poem and were relocated in the 1805 Prelude, betrays the hidden memory beneath the “spots of time.” These hidden memories, encounters with death from childhood to adulthood, function as a Gothic sub-text tormenting the post-Revolutionary Wordsworth. In the 1805 Prelude these questionable episodes are redistributed to different parts in order to make them structurally and thematically consistent, thereby silencing the dark side of memory of the poet. |