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Wordsworth's The Prelude, by his own profession, is about the growth of the poet's mind, especially the discipline of and by the faculty of Imagination. Yet he also betrays curious ambiguity towards his imagination: he embraces it, but at the same time manifests fear of, and retreat from, a total sympathy (or identification) with its sublime power. We may even say that The Prelude concludes with Wordsworth's relinquishing of his sublime imagination for the “mild grace” of the beautiful and its personification, Dorothy. Why does Wordsworth make this move? What makes him depict his forgoing of the possibility to become a second Milton as if it were a fortunate fall? This paper is an attempt to offer an explanation to this puzzling reservation of Wordsworth about the sublime power of his own Imagination. For this I turn to history—not the reified concept of History with the capital H of New Historicism, but the actually lived history, history in the good old Old Historicist sense if you will. In the course of it, I want to retrieve Wordsworth the man, a man swept into the vast historical theater of the French Revolution, a man who felt his disenchantment with the causes of the Revolution as a personal act of betrayal and apostasy and attempted to expiate it by repeatedly staging an Oedipal drama, in which he assumes the role of a guilty son and accepts chastisement, over and over again.
